October 01, 2014: Volume LXXXII, No 19

Featuring 321 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXII, NO.

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REVIEWS

CHILDREN'S & TEEN

Star Stuff

by Stephanie Roth Sisson A picture-book biography of Carl Sagan that's just as full of wonder and delight as its subject was. p. 118

FICTION

Us

by David Nicholls A family takes a disastrous tour of Europe in this charming follow-up to One Day. p. 22

NONFICTION

On His Own Terms

by Richard Norton Smith A monumental biography of the charismatic vice president and four-term governor of New York, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller p. 83

INDIE Comic legend Carl Reiner favors the random p. 136

on the cover

In Newbery Medal winner Christopher Paul Curtis' new kids' book The Madman of Piney Woods, a gentle monster teaches a scary grandmother about the meaning of reconciliation. p. 108

from the editor’s desk:

Behind a Large Publisher’s “Sudden” Buzz Is a Smaller House’s Hard, Thankless Work B Y C la i b orne

Smi t h

Photo courtesy Michael Thad Carter

If you haven’t yet read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, you’ve probably heard about it. If you pay attention to “most anticipated” lists or read publishing news, there’s no way you wouldn’t at least know that her gripping post-apocalyptic novel has some strong buzz behind it. (In a starred review, we said that “Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.”)

Station Eleven created a bidding war among six publishers and was published by Knopf several weeks ago.

Various media outlets have asked Mandel why readers are flocking Claiborne Smith to post-apocalyptic novels, how long she thinks that trend will last, and how her novel contributes or differs from other dystopian novels already published. I like the light-handed way Mandel infuses Station Eleven with the kind of coincidence that feels clever and revealing, not scripted, and I hope readers buy the novel and that Mandel can build a successful career from it. But because Knopf has done an admirable, thorough job of building anticipation for Station Eleven and because the novel is a departure from the earlier literary noir she’s published (The Singer’s Gun, Last Night in Montreal, among others), it’s easy to forget that Unbridled Books, a small, literary press that routinely takes gambles on new writers, saw talent in Mandel before any other publisher did.

I talked to Mandel recently, and she was refreshingly honest about making the transition from a small press to a bigger house. It Emily St. John Mandel doesn’t seem all that common for writers to talk on the record about moving from a small publisher to a big one, whether it’s because publishing is clubby and smart writers want to get along with the various houses that have published them or because an author’s new, bigger house understandably encourages him or her to concentrate on talking about the work they’re publishing, not what’s been published before by someone else.

“They worked so hard on the books,” Mandel said about Unbridled, “but I think there’s a larger problem in this country with the discoverability of books. It’s incredibly difficult for books from a small press to get attention. I’d done everything I could with Unbridled, and we just couldn’t find the readership that I wanted.” So she talked with her agent, Katherine Fausett at Curtis Brown, about trying to go bigger. Mandel said that Fausett obviously thought that was a good idea. “We talked to Unbridled, and they couldn’t be more gracious,” Mandel said.

“They really championed my books when no one else was. But I felt I didn’t have another choice but to go with a larger house.”

Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N # President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com Editor in Chief C laiborne S mith csmith@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Fiction Editor L aurie M uchnick lmuchnick@kirkus.com Children’s & Teen Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E

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contents fiction

The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.

Index to Starred Reviews............................................................5 REVIEWS................................................................................................5 editor’s note.................................................................................... 6 Meanwhile, back at the farm..................................................14 Mystery..............................................................................................30 Science Fiction & Fantasy......................................................... 40 Romance............................................................................................43

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews..........................................................45 REVIEWS..............................................................................................45 editor’s note.................................................................................. 46 Eula Biss inoculates herself................................................. 60

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews......................................................... 91 REVIEWS............................................................................................. 91 editor’s note..................................................................................92 On the Cover: Christopher Paul Curtis........................... 108 valentine’s day roundup.........................................................123 interactive e-books...................................................................125 shelf space.................................................................................... 128

indie Index to Starred Reviews........................................................ 129 REVIEWS............................................................................................ 129

Steven Gould raises the bar on teleportation in this enthralling sequel to Impulse. Read the starred review on p. 41.

editor’s note................................................................................. 130 Carl Reiner’s New Memoir....................................................... 136 Appreciations: A Bunch of Useful Information............ 147

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on the web What if you could make everything you eat more delicious? As creator of the WNYC podcast The Sporkful and host of the Cooking Channel Web series You’re Eating It Wrong, Dan Pashman is obsessed with doing just that. His new book Eat More Better weaves science and humor into a definitive, illustrated guidebook for anyone who loves food. But this book isn’t for foodies. It’s for eaters.

Pashman analyzes everyday foods in extraordinary detail to answer some of the most pressing questions of our time, including: Is a cheeseburger better when the cheese is on the bottom, closer to your tongue, to accentuate cheesy goodness? What are the ethics of cherry-picking specific ingredients from a snack mix? We’ll determine the answers with Pashman in an interview at kirkus.com in October.

9 Photo courtesy Lilia Cretcher for The Sporkful

w w w. k i r k u s . c o m Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9 The Federal Trade Commission receives more complaints about rogue debt collecting than about any other activity besides identity theft. Jake Halpern’s new investigative book Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld reveals why. It tells the story of Aaron Siegel, a former banking executive, and Brandon Wilson, a former armed robber, who become partners and go in quest of “paper”—the uncollected debts that are sold off by banks for pennies on the dollar. As Halpern reveals, the world of consumer debt collection is an unregulated shadow land where operators often make unwarranted threats and even collect debts that are not theirs. “Halpern brings unexpected literary heft to the world of debt collection,” our reviewer wrote. We talk to Halpern this month at kirkus.com.

And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors. We feature authors’ exclusive personal essays and reported articles on how they achieved their success in publishing. It’s a must-read resource for any aspiring author interested in getting readers to notice their new books.

If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She’d be watching old comedy sketches with him.

She’d be kissing him in the library stacks.

She certainly wouldn’t be at The Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school in rural Vermont, living with a weird roommate and signed up for an exclusive, mysterious class called Special Topics in English. But life isn’t fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.

Until a journal-writing assignment leads Jam to Belzhar, where the untainted past is restored and Jam can feel Reeve’s arms around her once again. But there are hidden truths on Jam’s path to reclaim her loss. Belzhar is the new teen novel by best-seller Meg Wolitzer; in a starred review, we called Belzhar “an enticing blend of tragedy, poetry, surrealism and redemption.” Check out our interview with Wolitzer this month.

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fiction THE GREAT SAND FRACAS OF AMES COUNTY

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Apps, Jerry Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin Press (269 pp.) $26.95 | $16.95 e-book | Sep. 18, 2014 978-0-299-30070-8 978-0-299-30073-9 e-book

INTO THE SAVAGE COUNTRY by Shannon Burke..............................7 THE MIDNIGHT PLAN OF THE REPO MAN

by W. Bruce Cameron.......................................................................................8 FIVE MINUTES ALONE by Paul Cleave............................................... 9 MR. MAC AND ME by Esther Freud....................................................12 THE BROTHERHOOD OF BOOK HUNTERS by Raphaël Jerusalmy; trans. by Howard Curtis....................................................................... 17 SOMEDAY WE’LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING

by Daniela Krien; trans. by Jamie Bulloch..........................................18 HER by Harriet Lane............................................................................19 IRÈNE by Pierre Lemaitre................................................................... 20 THE DRUM TOWER by Farnoosh Moshiri..........................................21 MISSING REELS by Farran Smith Nehme..........................................22 US by David Nicholls...........................................................................22 VANESSA AND HER SISTER by Priya Parmar................................. 26 THE FAMILY HIGHTOWER by Brian Francis Slattery...................... 28 ALL MY PUNY SORROWS by Miriam Toews.................................... 28 THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE by Bill Wittliff......................................... 29 I DID NOT KILL MY HUSBAND by Liu Zhenyun; trans. by Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Li-Chun-Lin............................. 29 DARKNESS, DARKNESS by John Harvey.........................................34 THE PIERCED HEART by Lynn Shepherd...........................................38

A homespun novel finds a small Wisconsin town torn between preservation and progress.

Folksy activism provides the impetus for Apps’ return to Ames County, where he’s set five earlier novels in this series (Tamarack River Ghost, 2012, etc.). He’s also published many nonfiction books about farming and rural life in Wisconsin, and the themes in those volumes invariably make their ways into his fiction as well. In this case, the small village of Link Lake finds itself caught between its past as a farming community and whatever prosperity the future might hold as a tourist destination. There’s a battle for the soul of the village between two organizations headed by two strong-willed women. Marilyn Jones, who inherited the village’s only supper club when her parents died in a car crash, leads the Link Lake Economic Development Council, whose initiatives invariably meet resistance from the Link Lake Historical Society, headed by feisty octogenarian Emily Higgins. Marilyn fumes, “When are these people going to quit focusing on the past and begin thinking about the future?” Tensions come to a head when a sand mining company strikes an agreement with the village that will require the removal of a “sacred tree.” The controversy attracts the attention of a mysterious but widely read syndicated environmental columnist with the pen name Stony Field, whose writings attract protestors to the site. Too many coincidences and surprises strain the reader’s credulity (including the possibility that an environmental columnist with an unknown identity could wield such national influence), but a Fourth of July parade, an explosion and a potentially fatal storm threaten to tear the town apart—or perhaps heal its wounds.

The result is Lake Wobegon with more environmental activism and historical preservation and considerably less humor.

EXO by Steven Gould............................................................................41 IN YOUR DREAMS by Kristan Higgins...............................................43

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it’s the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine) SIDNEY SHELDON’S CHASING TOMORROW

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, no one would have guessed it marked the beginning of a flood of dystopian novels that’s still rising, with three prominent entries receiving starred reviews from Kirkus this year: Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (“Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling,” said our review), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (a “quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness”), and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, which stretches from the recent past to the near future (“If Thatcher’s 1984 is bleak, then get a load of what awaits us in 2030”).

Atwood herself, after spending most of the past decade on the post-apocalyptic trilogy of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, has turned to the more private apocalypse of old age in a new book of short stories, Stone Mattress. Despite being an Atwood fan who’s read every other novel she’s written, and despite having enjoyed this year’s crop of dystopias (and many others), I never read her trilogy and was thrilled to see that she’d returned to the present, which Margaret Atwood has been sorely in need of her sharp eye and unsparing wit.

The senior citizens in Atwood’s world may need dentures, but they’re far from toothless—in any sense of the word.

Wilma, the nearly blind protagonist of “Torching the Dusties,” is grateful to the dentist who talked her into getting implants some years back, predicting she’d need something to hang a bridge on when her teeth, “being pre-fluoridation, would shortly be crumbling away like wet plaster.” “ ‘If I live that long,’ she’d replied with a laugh. She’d still been at the age when she’d liked to make death into a conversational flippancy, thus showing what a lively, game old bird she was.”

The book is full of ancient rivalries, four-letter words, the occasional ghost, sex and murder. What fun! —L.M.

Bagshawe, Tilly Morrow/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-06-230402-5

Photo courtesy Jean Malek

OFFCOMER

Baker, Jo Vintage (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-8041-7261-5 Unmoored and self-harming, the heroine of British novelist Baker’s (Longbourn, 2013, etc.) disturbing first novel— appearing for the first time in the U.S.—is caught in a suffocating downward spiral.

Offcomers are misfits, rootless souls, not locals, and Claire Thomas has become one of them. The only child of a fostered mother and a loving father silenced by illness, Claire grew up in the north of England alongside confident BFF Jennifer, but that relatively normal

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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Bagshawe switches out the infamous jewel thief from the late Sheldon’s If Tomorrow Comes (1985) with a brilliant replica.

It’s still the 1980s for Tracy Whitney.

After landing in Brazil, she gets right down to business, pulling a scam on a ruthless businessman just before marrying her partner in crime, Jeff Stevens, in a private ceremony. The two are determined to leave their criminal pasts behind and start a family, but infertility problems—and a seductive co-worker— lead to a misunderstanding that sends Tracy packing. Tracy’s predilection for bad luck is true to the source material, and she’s just getting started. Jeff is long gone when Tracy finds out she’s finally pregnant. Bagshawe handles all the drama with a light touch. When Nicholas tricks a little girl out of her lunch money, proving without a doubt that he’s Jeff ’s son, Tracy couldn’t be more proud that her kid is a budding con artist (so long as his victims are bullies). She builds a somewhat normal life with Blake Carter, a tragically nice guy who can’t make Tracy forget about Jeff but who makes a convenient babysitter when her past catches up with her. A French detective thinks he can prove the connection between Tracy’s most notorious crimes and a serial killer with a penchant for prostitutes and hotel room Bibles, forcing Tracy out of hiding. Soon, she and Jeff are working with law enforcement to catch the killer as they lift gaudy jewels and priceless artifacts from supposedly well-secured museums and homes, all with wonderfully cheesy prose: “The air was scented with tropical blooms and expensive perfume and the aroma of white truffles wafted in from the kitchen. But in the end, the one overpowering smell was money.” It’s astonishing how much this book evokes the past.

After nearly 30 years, Tracy Whitney hasn’t aged a day.

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Baker skillfully captures the alienation of a fragile young woman, but the signs of Claire’s shift toward hope are a long time coming.

early life has evolved into an isolated, drifting adulthood. As an awkward student at Oxford University, she met another lonely soul, philosophy student Alan, and after graduation followed him to his hometown of Belfast in Northern Ireland. There, in an uncertain political climate, Claire finds herself living in a punitive relationship, working a dead-end job. One particularly repugnant sex act leads to Claire’s moving out of Alan’s cramped flat and into a friend’s spare room, but she’s scarcely happier there, sleeping with the friend’s boyfriend and repeatedly cutting herself with a razor blade. While Baker’s intense debut lays down markers for the sensitively imagined novels to follow, this closely detailed first work is often bleak, and Claire’s insecurity can make for difficult reading. Eventually, while she’s on a desperate trip home to her parents, secrets about the past are broken open during a confrontation with Claire’s mother over a photo album, her mother’s sole pre-fostering possession that hints at but doesn’t confirm family connections. This burst of honesty, alongside acts of unexpected kindness by her Belfast boss, is enough to alter the balance of Claire’s sense of self-worth.

INTO THE SAVAGE COUNTRY

Burke, Shannon Pantheon (272 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-307-90892-6

The lure of the wilderness proves irresistible for a young trapper in this glorious American frontier novel, Burke’s (Black Flies, 2008, etc.) third.

In 1826, civilization ends in St. Louis; beyond is the vast expanse of the prairie. William Wyeth sees in it an invitation. The 22-year-old is looking for adventure, and the fur trade is booming. Wyeth joins a brigade bound for the

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western mountains, where they will set traps for beaver and muskrat and return with their pelts. The season is interrupted when Wyeth is felled by friendly fire during a buffalo hunt. The incident shatters Wyeth’s illusion that he’s immortal, but his spirits are restored by his fellow trappers’ camaraderie. Recuperating at a U.S. Army encampment, Wyeth meets Alene Chevalier, a part native French-Canadian tanner. After the trapper has another near-death experience, they fall in love, but Wyeth is not ready for domesticity quite yet. The St. Louis dandy Henry Layton is forming a new brigade and offers Wyeth a stake in it. Layton is a complex figure, marvelously well-observed. A bit of a scoundrel, battling his own demons, he is undeniably charismatic. Both Layton and Wyeth will learn that “[t]here is little that ails a man...that is not improved by a season in the mountains.” The second expedition, this one on Crow lands (Layton has negotiated a treaty), is all ups and downs. The overbearing Layton risks a mutiny, but the trappers rally behind him when he fearlessly confronts a British brigade leader. Borders are vague and the expansionist Brits, not the natives, are the enemy. The trappers harvest a record number of pelts, but safe passage back is far from assured. Burke includes fine episodes of derring-do, two involving bears, and there is a thrilling climax, but character is his overriding interest, the way it’s shaped by tests of endurance in magnificent, alien landscapes.

A grand immersion in the past.

THE MIDNIGHT PLAN OF THE REPO MAN

Cameron, W. Bruce Forge (336 pp.) $24.99 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-7653-7748-7

This laugh-out-loud mystery narrated by a word-clever repo man in Kalkaska, Michigan, will convince readers to keep on (tow) trucking.

Ruddy McCann has a bit of a problem: The voice of a murder victim, real estate agent Alan Lottner, has suddenly taken up residence in his head. “I want you to find the people who did this to me, and bring them to justice,” Lottner insists. At first, Ruddy, 30, thinks the chatter in his mind is the result of the dreaded malady “Repo Madness,” the consequence of too many years pursuing deadbeats, a perilous occupation that requires “nerves of stupidity.” But he soon finds that Alan—both a nag and a wisenheimer—is telling the truth about his death, and the pieces of this ingenious plot begin to click into place.

Ruddy is soon in hot pursuit of the two murderers, who are more depraved than he originally thought; he’s also in pursuit of the lovely Katie, who turn out—yikes!—to be Lottner’s daughter.

Through all the twists and turns of the unlikely plot, Ruddy is surrounded by a vividly drawn cast of characters, including Becky, his ultraresponsible sister, who had “a tapeworm or something that was always drawing the fun out of her”; Becky’s goofy new boyfriend, Kermit, a voluble Mr. Malaprop; Ruddy’s stud-muffin younger pal, Jimmy, whose earlier acting career “was somewhat 8

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hampered by his inability to act”; and Ruddy’s beloved dog, Jake, “fifty pounds of anyone’s guess.” While it’s no surprise that Ruddy gets both the evildoers and the girl, how he gets to that finish line is totally unexpected. A storyline that would be a car wreck in the hands of a less-talented writer turns out to be a delightfully entertaining road trip thanks to the deft touch of Cameron, a best-selling author (A Dog’s Journey, 2012, etc.), humor writer and independent movie producer.

This spirited novel, a rollicking mystery and sweet romance rolled into one, is the perfect vehicle for a wild joy ride.

TREAT US LIKE DOGS AND WE WILL BECOME WOLVES

Chute, Carolyn Grove (704 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-1945-2

Second volume in a planned series about the St. Onge Settlement (The School on Heart’s Content Road, 2008, etc.), a collective of disaffected have-nots in North Egypt, Maine.

At first we see the settlement and its charismatic leader, Gordon St. Onge, mostly through the eyes of Record Sun feature writer Ivy Morelli, who receives multiple phone messages warning of child abuse, drugs, guns, religious brainwashing, and anything else the anonymous callers think might prompt her to visit the place and expose its nefariousness. In the scornful eyes of Gordon and other settlement members given voice in this polyphonic novel (which also includes the comments of extraterrestrial “grays” we could do without), Ivy is a media lackey of the ruling class, alternately dishing out human-interest pabulum and scary crime stories to keep the masses frightened and passive. In a country that prefers to ignore the existence of social classes, Chute’s contempt for such air-brushing is bracing, as is her refusal to neaten up her decidedly flawed male protagonist’s opinions and actions. “There is only left or right down here among us crawling grubs,” Gordon sneers. “[A]t the top...there is the unity of ideology.” He despises corporations and well-meaning liberals equally. He also dislikes feminists and has an awful lot of “wives” with an awful lot of babies; his newest spouse, Brianna Vandermast, is only 15. Brianna is no victim, however; she goads Gordon to move beyond creating an alternate world at the settlement and directly challenge the political system that pretends to serve democracy. This provokes sinister undercover servants of the powers that be to make use of Gordon’s messy personal life to manipulate another rebellious proletarian into doing their dirty work.

The plot, the prose and the political pronouncements are as over-the-top as they often are in Chute’s work— which by no means negates the value of her career-long mission to show the elite what people at the bottom of the heap think of the American dream. Bottom line: They’re not fooled. (Agent: Jane Gelfman)

FIVE MINUTES ALONE

sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor; innocent Jamaican fishermen are vaporized; one of Castro’s ministers is assassinated; three oil workers are trapped in a deep-water diving bell; an oil exploration ship is sunk; and Dirk and Summer, children of Dirk the elder, confront danger with derring-do in Mexico as they seek clues to an ancient Aztec codex. Cussler’s regulars are on hand, including Al Giordino, Dirk’s number two, with “the burly build of a professional wrestler combined with the toughness of an elder crocodile.” Chief villains are two, both greedy Cuban commies. Gen. Alberto Gutier has political ambitions, and he’s charged ruthless Juan Diaz with financing those ambitions via rogue deep-sea mining. Diaz dupes the CEO of a Canadian mining company, an enlightened, environmentally conscious fellow who’s a bad judge of business partners, into providing the high-tech equipment. However, Diaz’s explorations vent mercury into pristine tropical waters, and that attracts NUMA’s attention. Descriptive flourishes, such as “he raised him off the floor and ground his teeth in the man’s face,” sometimes clank, and there’s a plot hole or two as ships sail around the Caribbean setting off explosions that register as seismic events. The other

Cleave, Paul Atria (464 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 21, 2014 978-1-4767-7915-7

Think vigilante killers have it easy?

Cleave offers a macabre, compelling demonstration of how Murphy’s Law dogs the efforts of ex-cop Carl Schroder to give victims of violent crime the five minutes alone they crave with the criminals who’ve ruined their lives.

Even more than Carl’s earlier cases (Joe Victim, 2013, etc.), this one is a catalog of the profoundly damaged souls who throng Christchurch, New Zealand. Kelly Summers has never been the same since she was stabbed and raped five years ago. Carl’s old partner, DI Theodore Tate, spent months in a coma before emerging to a shaky second chance. Tate’s wife, Bridget, still has days when she thinks her daughter Emily, killed by a drunk driver her husband secretly executed, is still alive and panics because she can’t find her. Most damaged of all is Carl, who, having lost the ability to feel most emotions, keeps woodenly telling himself, “Why was anything.” When Kelly’s rapist, Dwight Smith, gets released from prison and promptly goes after Kelly to finish the job he started five years ago, Carl is on hand to stop him. That’s where the good news ends, for once Carl offers Kelly her five minutes alone with Cowboy Dwight, the rest of this long, winding tale becomes an encyclopedia of all the things that can go wrong once you’ve embarked on a career of meting out summary justice.

You can forget to conceal vital evidence against yourself. Your friends can suspect what you’re doing and be deeply ambivalent about how to react. You can pick the wrong people to execute, either because they’re not really guilty or because they’re capable of fighting back. The car you’re using to transport a victim’s body can run out of gas. It’s Murphy’s Law written in blood.

“All of this killing has made him feel,” Carl’s exhilarated to realize. Readers following him through this season of Breaking Bad reworked by the Coen Brothers will feel the whole gamut right along with him.

HAVANA STORM

Cussler, Clive; Cussler, Dirk Putnam (480 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-399-17292-2 In a quest connecting Aztecs, the Spanish-American War and boatloads of modern villains, Cussler pater et filius (Poseidon’s Arrow, 2012, etc.) chronicle another adventure of the venerable Dirk Pitt, chief of the National Underwater

and Marine Agency.

Cussler addicts crave action, and the authors deal it out liberally. In the first 200 pages, there’s a flashback to the 1898

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VAMPIRES OF MANHATTAN

half of the Aztec codex—road map to riches—is found after a bit of crafty research, requiring more undersea work, descriptions of which are Cussler’s forte. Few read Cussler for literary nuance and protagonists steeped in irony, but Pitt and company are the stuff of heroic dreams: beautiful and high-minded and generous rich folks with cutting-edge technology and ample time to save the world.

Another super Cussler fun read fit for a lazy weekend.

de la Cruz, Melissa Hachette (288 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-4013-2471-1

De la Cruz’s new adult series based on her Blue Bloods books for teens (Gates of Paradise, 2013, etc.) starts off with a fang.

The Upper East Side is no longer the hub of activity for Manhattan’s elite underground coven of fallen angels who live among humans as vampires. Ten years after defeating Lucifer in an epic battle, the Blue Bloods have grown up and moved to trendier parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn to keep evil at bay while building their fine art collections and wishing their immortality could extend to their marriages. Jumping quickly between narrators and time frames, the lengthy exposition plays out like a television drama centering on the Four Hundred Ball, where Oliver Hazard-Perry will be anointed leader of the vampire coven with his “mortal beloved,” Finn Chase, at his side. But Finn is growing tired of feeling like a second-class citizen, and her attempts to rebel are the stuff of tabloids. So are Kingsley Martin’s. Left to rot in hell—literally—by his wife, Mimi, Kingsley’s New York homecoming takes a creepy turn when he’s linked to a missing teenage girl. Mimi, who now works in an art gallery, is busy preparing a curious collection of artwork painted in red blood for the ball, though she clearly misses Kingsley and wants him to stay. Working behind the scenes to keep the celebration from becoming a blood bath are vampire detective Ara Scott and her newly assigned partner, werewolf Edon Marrok; they track a killer who has left a trail of bloody pentagrams throughout the city. Following leads while trying not to expose the vampires to the mortal world, the investigators uncover some of the story’s most scandalous details as they find security breaches that signal trouble for humans and vampires alike. Jack and Schuyler fans will have to wait until the epilogue for an update, but it comes with a teaser for the next book.

Over-the-top drama and a breezy pace leave more to look forward to in the series.

THE PERFECT MOTHER

Darnton, Nina Plume (240 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-14-219673-1

In this fictionalized account of the Amanda Knox case, journalist Darnton asks the question any parent would dread: Is my child capable of murder?

Although certainly inspired by the Knox trial, Darnton focuses more on the emotional landscape—the relationship between mother and daughter, how a child’s accomplishment becomes the parent’s. On the surface, Jennifer Lewis seems that titular perfect mother, and the proof is in Emma, the kind of teenager who volunteers, makes good grades and gets into Princeton. Now on her junior year in Spain, Emma calls home with the shocking news that a man tried to rape her and has been killed. Jennifer flies to Seville, but her reconciliation with Emma is surprisingly rocky. Released after intensive questioning (she claims that after she screamed for help, a stranger came into her apartment, killed the rapist and fled), Emma is hostile and uncommunicative. Their high-priced Spanish lawyer and private detective Roberto Ortiz suggest more cooperation—according to Spanish law, if the police simply charge her with a crime, she can wait up to four years in prison before a trial even begins, and as it stands, the police don’t believe her story. And neither does Emma’s father, Mark, a corporate lawyer, though Jennifer is convinced her daughter would never lie. As Jennifer becomes angry at Mark for his disloyalty, she becomes close with Roberto, who offers just the reassurances (she really is a good mother) that Jennifer needs to hear. When Emma’s story begins to fall apart—her boyfriend, Paco, is an ex-con drug dealer, the “rapist” a good boy from an affluent family, and her own kitchen knife is the murder weapon—Jennifer considers other aspects of her daughter’s past, including lying, cheating and stealing, that reveal more than she can admit about her daughter and herself.

A fast-paced thriller with the kind of emotional impact that transcends a simple whodunit.

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THE BOSTON GIRL

Diamant, Anita Scribner (336 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-4391-9935-0

A Jewish woman born in 1900 tells her granddaughter about growing up in the 20th century.

Diamant (Day After Night, 2009, etc.) establishes an agreeable, conversational tone in the opening paragraph: “I’m flattered you want to interview me,” Addie says. “And when did I ever say no to my favorite grandchild?” It’s 1985, and we quickly learn that Addie is the daughter of Russian |

immigrants, the only one born in the New World but not the only one to disappoint her bitter, carping mother by turning out to be “a real American.” Older sister Betty horrifies their parents in 1910 by moving out to become a saleswoman at Filene’s, and Addie flouts their limited expectations by attending high school and joining a reading club at the local settlement house. It’s there she learns about Rockport Lodge and snatches a vacation at this “inn for young ladies in a seaside town north of Boston” with the help of the settlement house’s nurturing Miss Chevalier. On her first trip to the lodge in 1916, Addie forms lifetime friendships with other striving working-class girls, particularly Filomena, whose affair with a married artist demonstrates the promises and perils of the new freedoms women are claiming. Addie’s narrative rambles through the decades, spotlighting somewhat generic events: the deaths of two nephews in the 1918 flu epidemic, an unfulfilling romance with a traumatized World War I veteran, an encounter with a violent rumrunner. Her increasing aspirations take her from a secretarial job to a newspaper, where she climbs from typist to columnist with the help of other uppity

women. True love arrives with labor lawyer Aaron Metsky, and a quick wrap-up of the years after 1931 tells us Addie found her vocation as a social worker and teacher.

Enjoyable fiction with a detailed historical backdrop, this sweet tale is paradigmatic book club fare, but we expect something more substantial from the author of The Red Tent (1997) and The Last Days of Dogtown (2005).

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2014

Egan, Jennifer—Ed. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (384 pp.) $14.95 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-547-86886-8

The latest installment in a venerable series whose origin stretches back a full century.

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In her slender but charming introduction, guest editor and novelist Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) recalls that she’d been publishing short stories for 21 years “before I managed to eke one into these pages!” Never mind the misuse of “eke”; we know what she means, and the fact is that there’s a lottery aspect to the whole enterprise. It helps to have been published in the New Yorker, as several of these pieces have been; it helps to be Joyce Carol Oates, who appears here, of course, with a story that seems tossed off for her but that would be a major accomplishment for most other writers. Recognizing the “essential arbitrariness” of the honor, then, Egan moves on to select 20 stories that are perfectly exemplary, each in its way.

T.C. Boyle does his existential ennui thing with a yarn (from the New Yorker, of course) that hinges on booze, satellites and rancor (“We’d been fighting all day, fighting to the point of exhaustion, and it infuriated me to think she wouldn’t even give me this”). Continuing the boozy theme—writers and their booze!— Ann Beattie serves up a lovely slice of melancholy with a story of a former student bantering with a dying professor (“Enabler?

Don’t use phoney words like that”) while puzzling over why her ex-husband happens to be in the bar at the same time. All are serviceable, none bad, but few of the stories are true tours de force, with one notable exception being Lauren Groff ’s “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” the key word being the penultimate one, and Laura van den Berg’s odd, pensive “Antarctica” and its utterly memorable closing line—fittingly, and artfully, the last in the collection.

Intelligently chosen; essential for students and aspiring writers of fiction as a kind of state-of-the-art (or at least state-of-the-trend) snapshot, with a few standouts.

a 22-year-old “classic erudite vagabond.” Why Marian falls in love so deeply so fast isn’t clear; Daniel’s lines as he woos her are comical at times, verging on satire. Far more interesting are the arguments they have after Daniel proposes they leave Cuba together. He spins tales of a wondrous life in Madrid, and Marian responds that she’d rather not end up “an undocumented dishwasher in a foreign city.” The novel feels a bit patched together as Marian discovers she’d like to be a writer someday.

But the humor, anecdotes about the revolution and political commentary make each page worthwhile. Marian contends that the people she knows aren’t like those in novels about Cuba by Jose Saramago or Paul Auster. “Real literature isn’t denouncing Cuba and socialism for three hundred pages seasoned with sex and local color.”

A sharp, funny blend of politics and romance that strikes out in a new direction.

MR. MAC AND ME

Freud, Esther Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-62040-883-4

For a teenage boy living on the coast of England in 1914, change is everywhere.

Freud’s (Lucky Break, 2011, etc.) evocative new novel intermingles the dawning consciousness of an imaginative, creative child, who meets a real artist, with the irreversible alteration brought to a small community by the start of World War I. The Suffolk coastal landscape—it history, weather, natural fabric and ever shifting aspects—suffuses Freud’s delicately detailed chronicle of village life, in which sailing, fishing, shipwrecks and beachcombing are the stuff of local existence. Tom Maggs, 13 and born with a twisted foot, knows the terrain like the back of his hand and roams it freely. Tom has a taste for drawing, which is how he first encounters the dark figure of Mac, aka Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the noted Scottish architect and painter who, with his wife, also a renowned artist, is living locally, recuperating from illness after a career dive. Tom’s father, an alcoholic, terrorizes his family while the Mackintoshes’ loving companionship offers a different version of marriage. The couple also encourages Tom’s sketching, and he becomes their mail boy, delivering their letters to the post office, after steaming them open to read the contents. Once war begins, soldiers constantly come and go, the town and beaches are fortified against invasion, and Zeppelins fly overhead, dropping bombs. Tom and those around him are increasingly affected by the new laws, the distant fighting, and the national mood of fear and suspicion. When crises arrive, they propel the boy forward into an unimaginable future in which he will always cherish the love and artistic devotion he witnessed during that shattering year.

A touching coming-of-age story, powerfully but gracefully infused with a spirit of place, which also pays tribute to a revered artist.

A CORNER OF THE WORLD

Fernández-Pintado, Mylene Translated by Cluster, Dick City Lights (136 pp.) $14.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-87286-622-5

Modern-day Cuba comes to life in this story of a professor who falls in love with a young writer.

Fernandez-Pintado’s novel, capably translated by Cluster, challenges the tropes and stereotypes inherent in much of the literature about Cuba to add a new perspective. It’s narrated by Marian, who at 37 is absorbed in her work as a Spanish literature professor in Havana. She’s happy enough, though mourning the loss of her mother, who raised her alone. Each member of her small group of close friends has a story about travel, “the golden apple of our unending national desire,” and how they’ve survived hardships— without sentimentalizing them—to maintain their roots while so many others have left, returned, left again, in cycles. Marian is on the fence. Her ambivalence is jolted a little after her ex-boyfriend Marcos leaves for London. But she’s really shaken up after her boss at the university asks her to write the introduction to a new book, and she meets the author, Daniel Arco, 12

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NOW WE WILL BE HAPPY

Simon Johanssen into a place run by an archfiend who’s tougher still, a “professional criminal, gangster, murderer” who wants Simon dead. Now, why would Simon, who certainly takes his lumps in this tale, want to go to such an uninviting place? Apparently, because some sniper justice needs to be visited on a woman who has done Very Bad Things, a sentiment that seems to be widely shared. But hasn’t everyone in The Program done such VBTs? Well, there’s the question. The cat and mouse that ensues is satisfying though not without flaws: Giltrow’s characters can’t stop gabbing, the narrative suffers from occasional patches of overwriting (“But my brain won’t let me sleep: I lie there while the thoughts tick in my head, metronomic, insistent, like the drip of a tap”), and it stretches credulity and patience for everyone in the story to nurse a secret-life back story. Still, Giltrow’s villains are just right (who doesn’t hate medical insurers, for one thing?), and the worldbuilding she does in imagining The Program to begin with is worthy of a well-made sci-fi yarn, pushing genre bounds in interesting ways.

Well done overall. A pleasurable, complex read that runs a touch long—and, as Giltrow reminds us, “It is all about distance.”

Gautier, Amina Univ. of Nebraska (140 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2014 978-0-8032-5539-5

This colorful collection, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, illuminates the hyphenated identities of Afro–Puerto Ricans in the Northeast U.S. and on the island itself.

Gautier’s (English/Univ. of Miami; At-Risk, 2011) 11 linked stories feature fractured families and intergenerational language barriers. In the raw though tender “Remembering,” Manny has no memories of his mother but learns to adopt his older brother’s memories as his own: “He was smarter than I was and he knew we would never see her again. So he stopped my tears with memories.” In the exquisite “The Last Hurricane,” the narrator, a widow raising two children on the island, expresses her frustration with condescending mainland relatives: “[T]hey really don’t care and they don’t know anything about being a Puerto Rican in Puerto Rico anymore....You have become a postcard to them.” Other stories, particularly those that appear in reverse chronological order, feel thin. Nena’s bitterness toward her grandfather in “Aguanile” seems misplaced without a better, more complete understanding of her other familial relationships, which only comes later in “How to Make Flan.” The title story, centering around the meek and vulnerable Rosa, leaves too many loose ends, leaving the reader unsettled until “Muneca.”

Still, Gautier writes fresh, spirited characters with stylistic flair: “By the time the other stores on the block open, the sun will be out and the sky will look like a sky, not the way it looks to Nelida now, like an ocean flung high above her head.”

A verdant, multilayered though uneven collection.

THE DISTANCE

Giltrow, Helen Doubleday (368 pp.) $26.95 | $11.84 e-book | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-385-53699-8 978-0-385-53700-1 e-book A literate though gritty thriller by Oxford-based mysterian Giltrow.

Who guards the guards while they’re guarding the rest of us? So asked the Roman poet Juvenal. Giltrow offers a wrinkle: If the guards are criminals to begin with, top dogs in a “self-regulating society made up of other criminals,” then who are the criminals, and why bother guarding them? No matter: She ably imagines a near-future republic of miscreants that exists alongside our own. The Program, as it’s called, is impregnable—supposedly.

Populated by the dregs of society—supposedly—it allows no entry or exit. That’s before elegant socialite Charlotte Alton goes all Batman, of course, and in her alter ego as the tough sociopath Karla, helps insinuate the even tougher sniper and spook-on-the-run |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Jane Smiley

At the opening of her new trilogy, the Pulitzer winner returns to the kind of storytelling she learned early on

By Megan Labrise Smiley is the acclaimed author of over a dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner A Thousand Acres, two short story collections, several works of nonfiction and a handful of YA novels. She was born and raised in California but studied literature in upstate New York (BA, Vassar College) and Iowa (MA, MFA, Ph.D., University of Iowa) and often bases her stories in rural America.

For The Last Hundred Years Trilogy, chronicling the life of the fictional Langdon family, Smiley returns to Iowa. Book 1 of three, entitled Some Luck, begins in 1920 with the birth of farmers Walter and Rosanna’s first child, Frank. He’s delivered with the assistance of the inebriated town doctor, according to family lore.

From infancy, Frank is a handsome boy who exhibits a keen mind. “Now that he was crawling, Frank found that many doors were closed to him....It seemed that he could never get anything to his mouth that he actually wanted to get there. Whatever he grabbed was immediately removed and a cracker was substituted, but he had to explore all the features of crackers, and there was nothing more about them that he cared to find out,” Smiley writes.

Smiley affords the same consideration to capturing Frank’s knee-high vantage as she does for an adult’s point of view. “I wanted to write about how a person evolves through his or her whole life, and that was one of my main inspirations,” she says. “I also wanted to see how individuals live through history, what it means to them as they experience it and then as they look back upon it.”

It’s hard not to see second son Joe in relation to his older brother—and he’s no match: “It was as if God had picked all the worst features of both families and given them to Joey,” Smiley writes. Even father Wal-

Photo courtesy Elena Seibert

Jane Smiley is one of three siblings. Her mother was one of five, and her grandfather was one of 10. That meant cousins and second cousins, and lots of them.

“There was this sense of there always being someone around to play with or to criticize or to talk about—and my family were very big talkers about,” Smiley says. “My mother and her various siblings and my grandfather were terrific storytellers. My grandparents had had a fairly adventurous life, things hadn’t particularly gone well, but they had a great talent for turning all of those anecdotes humorous, rather than sad. Somebody would tell us a story, and we’d all laugh. Later, in the kitchen, another aunt would say, ‘No, it didn’t really happen that way. This is the way it really happened....’ It was a wonderful way for a novelist to grow up.”

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ter is inclined to feel a bit brushed aside: “And now he was a farmer, and no longer a boy, and it was disorienting how quickly Frankie was superseding him as the hope of his own father and mother and wife for something that had nothing to do with Osageorange hedges and badly sited barns and too many cows and not enough hogs (or vice versa),” she writes.

Rosanna gives birth to four more children, Mary Elizabeth, Lillian, Henry—whom she delivers all by herself, while Walter and the kids are out—and, finally, Claire. And though the narrative meanders from one to another, painting a vivid portrait of a highly individualized group in clear and unsentimental prose, the collective gaze seems to return, time and again, to the firstborn son.

“I intended Frank to be the main character, in the sense that everything revolves around him though he’s not in every scene, and every plot isn’t oriented toward him,” Smiley says. “Let’s call him the central character. He’s the trunk of the tree that grows up in the middle and is a little bit thicker than the other branches—not to say that he’s my personal favorite.”

While writing the trilogy—all three volumes have already been turned in to her editor—Smiley says that she “got to feel like I was part of the [Langdon] family, and so I would have feelings about each character that varied along the way. I would be annoyed with somebody sometimes, and I would be partial to somebody most of the time and would be critical of some, which was quite interesting to me. I’m very fond of Lillian—I’m very fond of Henry, because he’s so eccentric—and I’m interested in Frank, because he’s adventurous, but my level of fondness for him varies as he pursues his various activities.”

That Frank will pursue his various activities off the farm becomes apparent early—he cannot be contained. But the early lessons of farm life—especially the cold hard fact of mortality—color his adventures as he attends college, performs sniper duty abroad during the second world war and starts a family of his own.

“On a farm, you knew that you could die from anything, or you could survive anything. ‘Why?’ was a question that his relatives never asked—they just told the stories, clucked, shook their heads,” Smiley writes.

Some Luck ends in 1953, but the Langdons live on.

Book 2, slated for publication in spring 2015, will extend the narrative and modify some seemingly self-

evident truths. It’s a mode of telling and retelling that closely resembles the one Smiley learned early on, in the parlor with the whole family, and the subsequent kitchen debriefings, all those years ago.

Smiley turned 65 at the end of September. “You look back on your life and it seems to have been pretty short,” Smiley says. “A lot of things that were actually long, long ago seem quite present to you, so I wanted to get at that feeling” in Some Luck, she says. “But also, sometimes, events come and go, too, and these things that are very important to us at the time, that have the quality of a climax in a novel—they pass.”

Megan Labrise is a freelance writer and columnist based in New York.

Some Luck Smiley, Jane Knopf (416 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-307-70031-5

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“Gordon’s collection of stories is an offbeat mix of absurdist violence, sexual fantasy, literary experimentation and self-effacing humor.” from from white tiger on snow mountain

THE HUMAN BODY

the nurse’s legs and desperately hoping she smiles at me.” “We Happy Few” plays with the clichés of writerly stardom, as a former wunderkind takes a job as drug counselor and babysitter for a troubled but gifted young novelist. There’s something of a triptych about childhood in the middle section, opening with the poetic “Vampire of Queens” and continuing with the one-two punch of “Matinee” and “I Think of Demons.” These stories find a man recalling the secret language and common touchstones of his childhood with remembrances of a friend who would eventually succumb to his own demons. Some stories don’t walk the fine line that the author has managed before.

“What I’ve Been Trying to Do All This Time” is a cloying bit of hipster metafiction in which an Argentinean student becomes obsessed with “David Gordon,” and the story just happens to feature a cameo appearance by one of Gordon’s real-life friends, novelist Rivka Galchen. Two strong stories help close the book—the title story finds a man trying to get his life back into balance by quitting smoking, balancing his chi and polishing his writing by chatting with girls on X-rated websites. The most mainstream story, “The Amateur,” is easily found as an e-book, but is nevertheless a nifty portrait of an aging wiseguy in Paris.

A bit of stylish enjoyment for readers willing to poke a bit of fun at both icons and iconoclasts.

Giordano, Paolo Translated by Appel, Anne Milano Pamela Dorman/Viking (336 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 2, 2014 978-0-670-01564-1 Giordano’s (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, 2010) unorthodox Afghanistan war novel is short on action but rich in psychological insight.

In a post outside Afghanistan, a team of Italian soldiers copes with boredom, fear and barely human living conditions. This is no typical group of heroes: Medical officer Egitto is a former male prostitute who’s just learned that one client is pregnant with his child; Cpl. Ietri is a naïve 20-yearold who’s still attached to his mother. One officer gets into an online relationship that turns abusive. Another is a bully who singles out one subordinate for mistreatment, Full Metal Jacket style. And two female officers drift into unhealthy relationships with their colleagues. For much of the book, the closest thing they see to action is an epidemic of food poisoning. Military engagement finally arrives in the form of an ill-advised plan to transport local truck drivers away from the reach of bloodthirsty insurgents. As some in the company predict, the mission is a disaster, with many of the major characters wiped out in an instant. There’s no easy resolution, but all the survivors are transformed as they return to their former lives. Giordano tells the story with economical language and a few memorable images, most notably that of the convoy getting overrun with sheep just before the carnage erupts.

As the title suggests, the book is less about military heroism than the devastating human impact of combat. Wellobserved and compassionate, this is a memorable look at imperfect people in extreme circumstances.

GRAY MOUNTAIN

Grisham, John Doubleday (384 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-385-53714-8

“I want all the boys to sit up straight and notice, and not just my ass.” Yup, there’s a new sheriff in town, and she’s come to bring down Big Coal—and maybe strut her stuff, too.

Grisham (Sycamore Row, 2013, etc.) has long proved himself to be a trustworthy provider of legal thrillers—formulaic, to be sure, and tossed-off, yes, but delivering the goods if you’re not too particular about the niceties of style. He is also uncommonly timely and topical. This book’s no exception: Our heroine is a bright young Ivy Leaguer newly furloughed, in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, from Big Law up on Wall Street. The deal: The company might call her back in a year if she uses the time to be a do-gooder somewhere in the real world. The real world turns out to be a hardscrabble coal patch in Appalachia, where traditions count, big dogs rule and, as Grisham portentously writes, “there was no hurry in burying the dead.” Not in cold weather, anyway, and the little town where Samantha finds herself is appropriately chilly and gloomy, the kind of place where black lung disease floats in the air along with the bullets from the goon squad. The good guys are few, the bad guys many, and those baddies are busily doing bad things wherever they can: poisoning streams and wells, killing teenage girls with their big trucks, murdering folks who get in their way. Can Samantha save the day? Sure, if she can only disentangle herself from the arms of the requisite dreamboat

WHITE TIGER ON SNOW MOUNTAIN Stories

Gordon, David Little A/New Harvest (304 pp.) $25.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-544-34374-0 Thirteen carefully crafted short stories from Gordon (Mystery Girl, 2013, etc.) about writers, renegades and other beautiful losers.

Much like his two previous novels, Gordon’s collection of stories is an offbeat mix of absurdist violence, sexual fantasy, literary experimentation and self-effacing humor. The opener, “Man-Boob Summer,” is the comic tale of a washed-up grad student who wastes his summer lusting after a lifeguard—but also a story that drifts into introspection. “That’s when I realized: It never stops, this nonsense,” muses the narrator. “We are fools to the end. On my own deathbed, no doubt, I’ll be peeking at 16

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WATER

and the tentacles of the darkly named Krull. Grisham is good as always on matters of legal procedure and local color; as one character notes, sagely, “When you sue a coal company in Appalachia you can’t always count on an unbiased jury.” Still, the reader can’t help but feel that we’ve been here before.

Literary fast food: It’s tasty enough, but it’s probably not so good for you, with or without the lumps of coal.

Jones, Lloyd Y Lolfa/Dufour (206 pp.) $19.00 paper | Nov. 5, 2014 978-1-84771-818-1 A family on a Welsh farm in a grim future struggle to survive in this stark, affecting novel with a vision that means to disturb.

The adults are Wil, who knows about farming; Elin, his sister, who has buried a husband and three children on the property; and Jack, her companion, a former computer specialist who helps Wil before slowly going mad. The younger generation comprises Elin’s remaining daughter, 16-year-old Mari, and son, Huw, 12. A Pole named Nico, aged about 20, will join them and prove resourceful, stealing horses, pigs and Mari’s heart. For most of the book, the story is one of daily labor to capture, cultivate or preserve the most basic food and to avoid despair. It’s clear from a few

THE BROTHERHOOD OF BOOK HUNTERS

Jerusalmy, Raphaël Translated by Curtis, Howard Europa Editions (256 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-60945-230-8

Reaching back to the tumultuous 15th century, Jerusalmy chronicles a fictional tale of real-life brigand/poet Francois Villon, dispatched to find The Brotherhood of Book Hunters.

Jerusalmy’s dense and erudite narrative begins in Paris. Villon has been imprisoned for his writings, but Louis XI and Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris, are scheming to break Rome’s hold over France. The pair want Villon to lure Johann Fust, a Gutenberg ally, to Paris to establish a printing concern to make his books more available. The king’s plot later expands. He forces Villon and Colin de Cayeux, another Coquillard bandit, to journey to Jerusalem, “homeland of prophets and psalmists, peasants and fallen angels.” They’re to find the shadowy Brotherhood, an eclectic collection of Jews, revisionist Christians and others intent on preserving the world’s knowledge, and secure books to supply the Paris printing presses. As the hardy pair trek “from Rue St. Jacques to Genoa, from Acre to the monastery in Galilee and to Safed,” characters abound: the fashionable fop and de’ Medici agent Federico Castaldi; archivist Brother Medard, a cranky, combative dwarf; and young Rabbi Gamliel ben Sira, gaon of Safed, who speaks for the Brotherhood’s secret leader. In the library, located deep underground in “Invisible Jerusalem,” Villon learns the Brotherhood’s collection includes the “overwhelming testament dictated by Jesus to the high priest Annas just before his arrest,” a document critical to the Papacy and freethinkers alike. In deft translation, the novel sparkles with fanciful descriptions—“He would throw a judicious quotation at an eminent rival as you throw a knife at a straw target”—and Machiavellian machinations, highlighted by scholarly but accessible ruminations on Aristotle and Plato, religion and humanism, which are symbolically relevant to the forces gathering to bring on Reformation and Enlightenment, “to free the word from those who had been keeping it hostage in their chapels and cellars for centuries.”

Literate. Brilliant. Entertaining.

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SOMEDAY WE’LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING

comments that wrenching changes have whittled the world down from a time in the 21st century when “everyone had gone to live in their laptops” to a new Dark Ages, devoid of fuel or iPods or manufactured goods. All the time the nearby lake grows and encroaches, and the characters struggle to be more than victims. Jones gives each space to ponder her or his lot, but he captures them best in quick strokes, such as these for Huw: “His shoulder blades stand out like knives and he hurts everyone with his love, passing from one to the other as a pet lamb might do, jabbing everyone with his neediness and his sharp little bones.” Hints of how the world went wrong eventually yield to blunt exposition accompanied by the sort of people who survived an even more brutal existence outside this farm’s family.

The sad beauty in this scorched latter-day Eden is wrung from an ugly environmental truth in which even Jones’ heavy-handed moral can’t be heavy enough if it means avoiding such another fall of man.

Krien, Daniela Translated by Bulloch, Jamie Quercus (240 pp.) $22.99 | Sep. 2, 2014 978-1-62365-084-1

Dense and descriptive, this debut coming-of-age tale is set against the fascinating background of German reunification.

It’s the summer of 1990, and the Berlin Wall has just come down, but in the countryside of East Germany, life remains largely unchanged since the war. Sixteen-year-old Maria is living with her boyfriend, Johannes Brendel, at his family’s house, one of the two independent farmsteads remaining in the area. The Brendels are successful farmers and accepting of wayward Maria, who has stopped going to school and made herself at home on the farm. She occasionally lends a hand but mostly reads The Brothers Karamazov and makes love with Johannes. Down the road, Henner’s farm is unkempt and wild, like Henner himself. He lives there alone and is known to drink to excess. The simplicity of Maria’s narration reveals her cleareyed awareness of those around her. Members of the Brendel family become plain as day with economic, descriptive grace. But despite her awareness and the stories she tells of her past—absentee father, ineffectual mother, the “honor” of attending a strict communist summer camp—Maria’s inner landscape, and her future, are unknown territories. She and Henner are drawn to each other with a blinding strength, and their collision and resulting affair are complicated and passionate. Maria fears and craves Henner; he in turn ranges from gentle to beastly. Their need for each other is absolute, even if the reasons behind it remain a mystery.

The juxtaposition of Maria’s personal turmoil with the broader changes in the way of life around her pulls an unyielding line of tension throughout the novel.

Timed with the political and cultural momentum of East Germany’s dissolution, this deceptively elegant story reveals great emotional and cultural upheaval.

SHOPAHOLIC TO THE STARS

Kinsella, Sophie Dial Press (496 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-8129-9386-8

Becky Brandon and her shopping habit head to Hollywood in the latest book in Kinsella’s series (Mini Shopaholic, 2010, etc.).

Shopaholic Becky, her husband and their daughter move from London to LA so Luke can tackle a new job doing PR for celebrities. Becky, however, is mostly interested in the celebrity part of his job— she wants to use Luke’s connections to become a stylist to the stars. After a lot of work (read: shopping) and a chance run-in with a thieving celeb, Becky winds up with a gig styling a real live actress...who just happens to be the nemesis of Luke’s client. Predictably, the entire situation gets out of hand, especially when Becky discovers that things aren’t always what they seem in Hollywood. Luckily, Becky’s best friend, Suze, is around to support her—that is, if Becky can manage to think about anyone’s problems but her own. Becky soon finds herself doing whatever she can to advance her career and stay in the press, even if it involves causing problems with Luke, neglecting her family and letting down her friends. With so many plots to keep straight (Becky’s dad’s mysterious quest, Becky’s BFF problems, Becky’s desire to be a stylist, the relationship between Luke and his mother), the book starts to feel a bit bloated and hard to follow. Luckily, Becky is a truly engaging narrator. She may be self-centered, a shopping addict and a bit flighty, but she’s also good-natured and genuinely funny. It’s a joy to accompany her on her journey, no matter how tangled it seems at times.

A light, enjoyable read that’s pure escapism.

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MAYOR OF THE UNIVERSE

Landvik, Lorna Univ. of Minnesota (296 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sep. 15, 2014 978-0-8166-9455-6

A bland actuary whose life is passing him by is nominated for an intergalactic contest, forcing him to revisit the childhood imagination that helped him survive loneliness and neglect.

Fletcher Weschel is boring. Abandoned by his father and raised by an ineffectual mother who alternately nags him to find more friends and clings to him when other men disappoint her, Fletcher has never managed |

“The minutiae of everyday life turn sinister for two women in this taut, fraught tale.” from her

to find a social groove. Pushing 40, he’s settled into a dull career and numbing drudgery: “The shell Fletcher had been in since boyhood was now a virtual sarcophagus.” As a child, he fought despair by creating a wide and colorful set of characters in his imagination, but as he sank into his insipid existence, he lost that vibrant internal life, until the night a band of aliens shows up in his bedroom, claiming he needs to represent them in a mysterious contest. Oddly enough, due to his formerly active imagination—“We’re great fans of your vivid fantasy life”— Fletcher is asked to embody their group’s mission: to be goofoffs and pursue fun. But as Fletcher and his alien guide, Tandala, who takes the human form of a large Jamaican woman called Tandy, “zamoosh” through his various imaginary characters’ fleshed-out lives, they’re confronted with a variety of experiences that wind up encompassing the best and worst expressions of human nature. Known for her funny-yet-poignant novels, Landvik takes an unexpected Dr. Who meets Quantum Leap turn, but through the interactions among Fletcher, Tandy and all the people they meet along the way—including a spunky second-grade teacher who bookends the various episodes— readers are treated to a remarkably lovely and sometimes-profound reflection of what it means to be human.

Beautiful writing and a keen eye for detail bolster a moving story that manages to be powerful and thoughtprovoking while remaining quirky, silly and fun.

shop, the women strike up an uneasy friendship. Emma sees in Nina the woman she wishes she could be: cultured and smartly dressed. What draws Nina to Emma is murkier. Nina, in fact, recognizes Emma, although Emma seems to have no memory of a past friendship. With chilling precision, Lane narrates the re-entwining of these two women’s lives through domestic details. Afternoon teas, disastrous shopping trips, cluttered homes and even well-populated playgrounds begin to seep with danger. And the net inexorably tightens.

A domestic thriller of the first order.

HER

Lane, Harriet Little, Brown (272 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-316-36987-9 978-0-316-36989-3 e-book The minutiae of everyday life turn sinister for two women in this taut, fraught tale.

In her sophomore novel, Lane (Alys, Always, 2012) alternates between the perspectives of Nina and Emma, two 40-something women who’ve taken different routes through motherhood. Both Nina and her second husband have teenage daughters from their first marriages, but except for a bit of adolescent surliness, the throes of child-rearing are well behind them. Nina can afford to dress with chic simplicity, to keep an elegant home and to avoid her father’s invitations to summer in the south of France.

Ever since his wandering eye (and probable philandering) broke up his marriage to Nina’s mother, Nina has resented Paul. His attentions never settle on her, so why bother with the charade of a happy luncheon, much less a family vacation? Emma, on the other hand, is saddled with a demanding toddler and expecting another baby. She knows she ought to be a doting mother, but desperate words underscore her thoughts: “All this buttoning and unbuttoning.” She longs for respite from the endless laundry and meal production but knows they’ll have to rely on Ben’s paycheck until the kids are in school. After Nina finds and returns Emma’s wallet, which she oddly lost at the greengrocer’s |

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“A book that no matter how fast the reader connects the dots still produces a bombshell that’s both brilliant and diabolical.” from irène

IRÈNE

stymied by the case. Although the dead women were found in an apartment in an otherwise abandoned industrial district, the man who rented out the apartment, Cottet, says that his tenant, Jean Haynal, disappeared after he took the place, and he remembers little, if anything, about the man. After the two women are identified as prostitutes Evelyne and Josiane and their investigation reaches a dead end, the team discovers a link to another disturbing killing, this time in Tremblay. In that case, the young woman’s death reminds Verhœven of something he’s read, and soon he’s putting the evidence into a context that is disturbing in its unpredictability. Making Verhœven’s job even more difficult is that information keeps leaking to the press, infuriating his superiors at a time when he can least afford to be distracted: He’s about to become a first-time father with his beloved wife, Irene, who is more than ready to have her baby.

Lemaitre’s measured, intelligent approach to a police investigation rings of authenticity, and he manages to make even the mundane activities interesting. But the real genius of this novel are the twists Lemaitre incorporates into the storyline, lifting it above the genre and into a different category entirely.

A book that no matter how fast the reader connects the dots still produces a bombshell that’s both brilliant and diabolical. (Agent: Albin Michel)

Lemaitre, Pierre Quercus (464 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-62365-800-7 978-1-62365-800-7 e-book Though this isn’t the first of Lemaitre’s books to be translated into English— that would be Alex (2013)—this was the first he wrote, and it introduces his unique and unforgettable police investigator, Commandant Camille Verhœven.

Verhœven, the diminutive (4 foot 11 inch) head of the Paris homicide squad, has a terrible crime on his hands: Two women were found gruesomely murdered, one of their heads nailed to a wall, their fingers severed and arranged, their bodies gutted and splattered with blood and feces, the words “I AM BACK” written in blood. Verhœven and his team—which includes his friend and sidekick, the wealthy and aristocratic Louis—are

SEE YOU IN PARADISE Stories

Lennon, J. Robert Graywolf (248 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-55597-693-4

Fourteen short stories about the quiet desperation and weary pessimism of a disparate collection of travelers.

One sometimes wonders if Lennon (Familiar, 2012, etc.) published his recent Salon essay, “How to Write a Bad Review,” in hopes of catching a break. Fortunately, the gifted novelist doesn’t need the help, especially if he continues to produce short fiction such as the unconventional yet emotionally resonant stories on display here. Culled from the past 15 years, the stories tend to drift toward two categories. The more exotic and eye-catching are those that insert some magical or paranormal element into a drab suburban landscape. In “Portal,” an otherworldly doorway to alternate universes becomes as boring as an old gaming console with time. In “Zombie Dan,” a couple finds that their recently resurrected pal is even more irritating when he comes back with an omniscient knowledge of their sins. In “The Wraith,” a wife’s depression cleaves from her to become a golemlike ghoul that haunts her husband. Then there’s “Weber’s Head,” an old-fashioned horror story whose narrator wouldn’t be amiss in the other category of stories of disaffected people on the edge of despair. “I was thoroughly debased, and at thirty-two felt like I’d been an old man for a long time,” says Weber’s roommate. “I saw no way of escaping the life I’d made for myself, save for the mountain falling down and crushing me.”

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THE MAGICIAN’S LIE

This theme of characters with their songs stuck in their throats runs throughout the book in stories like “No Life,” in which a couple struggles with adoption; “Total Humiliation in 1987,” about a marriage on the rocks; and “Hibachi,” a Carver-esque tale of the liberating power of home appliances. Perhaps best to end with “The Accursed Items,” an interesting diversion originally broadcast on This American Life.

Much like his contemporaries Kevin Wilson or Wells Tower, Lennon is one of those writers who defies categorization and is as likely to fit comfortably into Weird Tales as he is into Granta. (This review was first published in the Fall Preview 2014 issue.)

Macallister, Greer Sourcebooks Landmark (320 pp.) $23.99 | Jan. 15, 2015 978-1-4022-9868-4 A female illusionist is questioned about a murder in Macallister’s debut, set at the turn of the 20th century.

Janesville, Iowa, police officer Virgil Holt worries that an injury could mean the end of his law enforcement career, but a stroke of luck offers hope. A man identified as the husband of The Amazing Arden, aka Ada Bates, has been hacked up like a ham at Christmas, and Ada, the logical suspect, has just landed in Holt’s custody. Eager for information that might bolster his chances of continuing his career, Holt handcuffs his prisoner to a chair at the station and encourages her to talk. And Ada obliges and obliges and obliges—throughout the course of one very long, dull night. Launching into an autobiographical dissertation, Ada protests her innocence and describes how she was once tortured by her stepfather’s sadistic nephew, which led to her remarkable discovery of her body’s ability to heal itself quickly. Fearing for her safety, she gathered the courage to run away. During a journey that culminated with a job in a touring magic show, Ada made her way to New York City with a young man who won her heart. Unfortunately, his actions proved questionable, so she left him, at least for a time. Ada soon learned the subtleties of her art and, adding more ambitious acts to her repertoire, took over the show. But the past eventually caught up with her in a smoky theater in Chicago, and Ada faced a tough decision. Holt also tells his story—albeit with more brevity—during Ada’s infrequent pauses for breath and finally gets around to making a desperate offer before the unsurprising resolution. Macallister makes a concerted effort to ensure historical accuracy, but her prose is labored and lacks intensity.

Nevertheless, devotees of illusion may enjoy the story based on the author’s detailed focus on early costumes, movement and techniques.

THE MISSING PLACE

Littlefield, Sophie Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-4767-5782-7 A dark tale of two mothers seeking their sons, dead or alive.

Lawton, North Dakota, may be remote but it’s bursting at the seams with young men eager to cash in on the latest oil strike. Consultants and the occasional visitor compete for rooms at the packed hotels, while rig workers grasp a few hours of sleep in impersonal barracks constructed by the oil companies. Of course, most of the men leave within weeks, either worn down by the grueling pace or frustrated by the dearth of women. A few flee the danger of limbs mangled in the machinery—or worse. But two have simply disappeared. The police have little interest in, or manpower available for, tracking down Paul Mitchell or Taylor Capparelli, young men who probably just took off for a warmer climate or easier work. So their mothers take the investigation into their own hands. They are certainly a mismatched pair: Shay Capparelli has survived raising two kids on her own, with little help from their dads or from her bosses, which has left her tough yet brittle. Colleen Mitchell, accustomed to East Coast affluence, trusts blithely in her own financial power to bend everyone and everything to her will. Forced to share quarters in an icy mobile home, the women must quickly set aside their mistrust of each other to focus on finding their sons. But the police warn them to stay away from the case, the oil company stonewalls them, and their own pasts toss up personal obstacles. As twist leads to turn, they discover how poverty, greed and jealousy can add up to tragedy. Edgar Award nominee Littlefield (House of Glass, 2014, etc.) deftly contrasts Shay’s and Colleen’s experiences and prejudices. Although Colleen’s rather peevish perspective is wearying, her conflicts with Shay neatly calibrate her troubles with Paul. It’s a good yarn, weaving together corporate and personal malfeasance.

A satisfying, icy thriller.

THE DRUM TOWER

Moshiri, Farnoosh Black Heron (308 pp.) $25.95 | Oct. 16, 2014 978-1-936364-06-0

Family secrets, letters to a ghost father, and the Simorgh, or mythical Bird of Knowledge, inspire this lyrical tale set in Tehran on the eve of the Iranian Revolution.

When bitter, resentful matriarch Khanum-Jaan deems her 16-year-old granddaughter, Talkhoon, to be insane, she banishes her to the basement of Drum Tower, the family’s estate. Talkhoon spends her days avoiding the lustful advances of her uncle Assad, grieving her beloved Baba-Ji’s |

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“It’s a screwball comedy wedded to a gothic novel.” from missing reels

MISSING REELS

comalike state, and contemplating her mother’s mysterious, long-ago disappearance and her father’s preference for political activism over taking care of his daughters. Talkhoon’s only sources of comfort derive from the memories of Baba-Ji’s obsessive writings about the Simorgh and the sweet, hypnotizing songs of her sister’s setar from her rooftop room: “Taara’s melodies and the soothing silence between them rippled in my dark head like the repeating wavelets of the calm sea.” When Talkhoon finally escapes, she comes upon a country in chaos, in the midst of revolution: “When the narrow alley opened onto a wide street, we saw the tanks approaching. Their metal bodies were muddy and they crawled toward us like legless animals, seemingly intent on rolling over us.” In the shadows of the streets of Tehran, Talkhoon and her sister must find a way to forge a new life, free from the talons of ancestral spirits, their family’s calculating lies and the menacing nights of a country tearing at the seams.

Moshiri (Creative Writing/Univ. of Houston-Downtown; Against Gravity, 2006, etc.) weaves her striking narrative with camphor-scented dreams, wish-granting poems and the twilight ritual of the sapphire feather, creating an intricate, unforgettable tapestry.

Nehme, Farran Smith Overlook (352 pp.) $26.95 | Nov. 13, 2014 978-1-4683-0927-0 Rumors of a lost silent film send a quirky heroine and her bemused boyfriend on a delightful escapade.

It may be tough to make ends meet on her shopgirl’s paycheck from Vintage Visions, but Ceinwen Reilly embraces a poor-yet-glamorous approach to life, dressing in retro fashions and watching classic movies every night. But the balance is upset when Matthew Hill, a charming British mathematician, and his snooty girlfriend, Anna, waltz into the store. Ceinwen’s dismay at Anna’s arrogance turns to horror when she buys the earrings Ceinwen had set aside for herself. Less than a week later, Matthew is back in the shop, inviting Ceinwen to dinner, and a vintage-film–fueled romance ensues. Maybe it’s the moonlight, or maybe it’s the movies, but Ceinwen becomes convinced that Miriam, her downstairs neighbor, was part of the silent-film industry. Trouble is, Miriam isn’t talking. Soon enough, Ceinwen has turned amateur detective, dragging Matthew along as Nick to her Nora Charles. GQ’s 2008 Film Blogger of the Year, Nehme seamlessly weaves film titles, trivia and technical lore into her debut novel. Her pacing is exhilarating, racing Ceinwen and Matthew (well, mostly Ceinwen) from an obscure film preservation society (run by a curator stern enough to frighten even the man secretly in love with her) to a vintage flicks screening club to a rather dodgy collector’s apartment. An array of fabulous minor characters pops up along the way. It’s a screwball comedy wedded to a gothic novel: Anna, Ceinwen’s rival for Matthew’s affections, is, of course, Italian; Matthew himself is Catholic; and the missing film is a classic of gothic fiction. Through it all, Ceinwen and Matthew patter at a speed Katherine Hepburn would admire.

Simply grand; this tale begs to be filmed.

THE GOLDEN HOUR

Moss, Todd Putnam (336 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 4, 2014 978-0-399-16860-4

If you can teach about political conflicts, you can manage them: That’s the message directed at Amherst professor Judd Ryker when he’s unexpectedly plucked by the State Department to lead a new “rapid reaction unit” in Mali.

A coup is underway in the West African nation, his old stomping grounds, where he started coming up with his potentially powerful Golden Hour theory. Based on the principle that trauma patients have a better chance of recovering if they receive proper treatment within an hour, Ryker’s theory promises positive outcomes to political crises if they are subjected to proper diplomatic and back-door measures within 100 hours.

He discovers during his return to Mali that getting those measures carried out is no easy task. U.S. officials on whom he counts get caught up in the usual interagency competitions, England and France have their own interests to advance, and every day brings a new abduction, double cross, piece of misinformation or X factor—such as a drug ring. A former diplomat for West Africa, Moss knows of what he writes and, for the most part, writes well. Ranging from Washington to London to the Sahara Desert, the book effortlessly ups the tension while piling on surprises. The jumps into the past lead to some early confusion, and Ryker is a bit too spit and polish. But for those who want to know what it’s like to get caught up in a modern coup, this is a good place to turn.

A strong debut about a good man in Africa who gets tested at every turn.

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Nicholls, David Harper/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-06-236558-3 In his picaresque fourth novel, Nicholls (One Day, 2010, etc.) artfully unveils 25 years of a couple’s relationship.

Shortly before Douglas Petersen, his wife, Connie, and their 17-year-old son, Albie, are to take a “Grand Tour” of Europe, Connie makes a surprising announcement: She thinks their marriage “has run its course” and is thinking about leaving. Connie is panicked at the thought of Albie going to college at the end of summer, leaving her and Douglas alone in the house. Douglas, a straight-laced biochemist who “had skipped youth and leapt into middle age,” came along at a time when Connie, artistic and |

Evocative of its European locales—London, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Madrid—and awkward family vacations everywhere, this is a funny and moving novel perfect for a long journey.

free-spirited but directionless, needed someone sensible. Despite the announcement, Connie still wants to take this holiday together, and as their journey begins, so does Douglas’ examination of his marriage. Part travelogue, part personal history, Douglas’ first-person narration intersperses humorous observations of their travels, during which Douglas usually finds himself out of step with his art-loving wife and son, with his wistful recounting of their back story, from his unlikely courtship to his recent positioning as a misfit in his family of three. After a ruinous morning in Amsterdam, when Albie unwisely confronts a trio of arms dealers and Douglas intervenes in a way that infuriates his family, Albie runs away, and the “Grand Tour,” deemed a failure, comes to an end. Yet before it’s too late, Douglas seizes a chance to find his son, win back the affections of his wife, and make this journey, both literal and figurative, a heroic one after all. Nicholls is a master of the braided narrative, weaving the past and present to create an intricate whole, one that is at times deceptively light and unexpectedly devastating.

Though the narration is self-conscious at first, it gradually settles into a voice that is wistful, wry, bewildered and incisive, drawing a portrait of a man who has been out of his league for a long time.

YOU DON’T KNOW ME New and Selected Stories

Nolan, James Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette (296 pp.) $20.00 paper | Sep. 16, 2014 978-1-935754-34-3

The neighborhoods and nightlife of New Orleans provide vivid details in these stories of a city unlike any other.

Though Hurricane Katrina provides a line of demarcation in this collection, native son Nolan (Higher Ground, 2011, etc.) knows that folks have been leaving the city and lamenting the disappearance of

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Great Books

FOR EVERY READER

Crystoppers

Call Forth From The Deep

A play by play guide for wise parenting

Arlene Embola with Felicia L. Hamilton

Y. Aaron Kaweblum M.D. F.A.A.P.

www.authorhouse.com

www.authorhouse.com

978-1-4772-0890-8 | Hardback | $23.99 978-1-4772-0891-5 | Paperback | $14.95 978-1-4772-0889-2 | E-book | $3.99

978-1-4567-3104-5 | Hardback | $21.23 978-1-4567-3102-1 | Paperback | $14.99 978-1-4567-3103-8 | E-book | $9.99

Crystoppers is the thorough new guide for the modern parents. Rather than going to any lengths to stop a child from crying, parents will learn to take control and avoid giving into demands and temper tantrums.

Arlene Embola and Felicia L. Hamilton explore the biblical ideal of a woman’s hair being her glory in their new book Call Forth From the Deep. Together, the authors show how transformation begins at the roots.

Foothold in the Mountain

Billy Jackson

Constance Caruso

A Young Man’s Journey and Passion in a Young America

www.authorhouse.com

Ken Gomes

978-1-4918-0383-7 | Hardback | $28.99 978-1-4918-0384-4 | Paperback | $19.95 978-1-4918-0382-0 | E-book | $3.99

www.authorhouse.com

At twenty-five, Connie’s ingenuity landed her a job at a prestigious talent agency in 1950s Hollywood.

Rubbing elbows with Cary Grant and Marlon Brando, Connie lived the Hollywood dream. Her story, suffused with personal drama, is not for sissies.

978-1-4772-5222-2 | Hardback | $31.99 978-1-4772-5223-9 | Paperback | $23.95 978-1-4772-5224-6 | E-book | $3.99

When Billy Jackson joins up with a cattle drive going up the Shawnee Trail, he embarks on an extraordinary adventure that takes him from Texas to Fort Kearny to San Francisco and many exciting places in between.

Subtle Implications

The Veteran Next Door

R. Abraham Wallick

Stories from World War II Vol. 1

www.authorhouse.com

Randall Baxter

978-1-4918-0671-5 | Hardback | $31.99 978-1-4918-0672-2 | Paperback | $23.95 978-1-4918-0670-8 | E-book | $3.99

www.authorhouse.com

Do you ever wonder how the universe began? Or why we are here or why do bad things happen.

For anyone who’s ever pondered existence, Subtle Implications challenges the mind, depicting the author’s experiences as he answers life’s pressing questions.

978-1-4918-0379-0 | Hardback | $28.99 978-1-4918-0380-6 | Paperback | $19.95 978-1-4918-0378-3 | E-book | $7.99

The Veteran Next Door is a compilation of stories from the nationally broadcast radio show of the same name.

Drawing on stories from survivors of World War II, this moving collection reveals the true stories of war.

Little Giant Suns

Elsa

Lincoln

Simon Gandossi

www.xlibris.com

www.xlibris.com.au

978-1-4836-5429-4 | Hardback | $29.99 978-1-4836-5428-7 | Paperback | $19.99 978-1-4836-5430-0 | E-book | $3.99

978-1-4653-5907-0 | Hardback | $46.72 978-1-4653-5906-3 | Paperback | $28.03 978-1-4771-1626-5 | E-book | $4.27

A tale of self-discovery, Little Giant Suns affirms that the magic of life still exists. While it talks about the drudgery of daily life, adventures in military service and the ups and downs of growth and maturity, Lincoln discloses that the overall theme of his work is spiritual evolution. The book inspires hope and the courage to conquer life’s trials.

A compelling tale fi lled with drama, Elsa paints a stark portrait of a dark time in history when hatred claimed the lives of many innocent people, whose only sin was to be born a Jew. It also brings to light the prejudices that continue to exist today and how violence can suddenly rear its ugly head despite seemingly peaceful times.

Heaven

A Peace without Honor

What you would like to know

Sin and Retribution I

Rev. Peter A. Posca

Adalbert Lallier

www.authorhouse.com

www.xlibris.com

978-1-4817-6113-0 | Hardback | $28.99 978-1-4817-6114-7 | Paperback | $19.95 978-1-4817-6112-3 | E-book | $9.99

978-1-4797-8678-7 | Hardback | $26.99 978-1-4797-8677-0 | Paperback | $18.99 978-1-4797-8679-4 | E-book | $3.99

Where is Heaven and what is it like? In this fascinating and eye-opening book, Rev. Peter A. Posca shares many miracles he witnessed that ultimately reveal the glory and beauty of Heaven. The author describes how the devil became the devil as part of first time uncovered history of Heaven.

A Peace without Honor is a daring and dramatic narrative that highlights both the horrors of the Vietnam war and the suicidal attempts of seven Vietnamese nationalists to seek retribution during six days of terror on the U.S. mainland. This book is an eyeopener that highlights the negative outcomes of national selfishness, war, and war crimes.

The Big Conspiracy

Double Lover

The travails of a progressive safety regulator in a not- so-progressive aviation industry

Anonymous

Folasade Odutola www.authorhouse.com 978-1-4817-2222-3 | Hardback | $39.99 978-1-4817-2221-6 | Paperback | $31.95 978-1-4817-2223-0 | E-book | $3.99

The Big Conspiracy is a no-holds-barred, gripping narration of the politics, rot and intrigues characterizing the air transport business in a particular country. Pungent in style, infused with humor, raw wit and creative use of suspense, it is utterly enjoyable!

www.iuniverse.com 978-1-4759-8527-6 | Hardback | $37.95 978-1-4759-8526-9 | Paperback | $27.95 978-1-4759-8528-3 | E-book | $4.99

Miss, you’re also a boy! exclaims a startled gynecologist when Millie Nemos is sixteen.

Millie/Willie is propelled from a sensitive girl who only wants her brother’s love, to a Harvard Man who impregnates himself, to a double-sexed CEO who wants the whole country’s love.

“An utterly captivating story of identity”* and “a hugely entertaining tale.”* “A modern classic.”* –Kirkus Reviews

Sicilian Escapade A Devil in Eden Milton Pashcow www.xlibris.com

978-1-4836-5971-8 | Hardback | $22.99 978-1-4836-5970-1 | Paperback | $15.99 978-1-4836-5972-5 | E-book | $3.99

WWII was upon us. We served close behind the battle lines. No blood and guts or heroics; from North Africa through Italy and Germany. We witnessed the human toll on civilians, the hollow eyes of hungry children and the despair of the aged. Life was harsh. Into this pitiful scenario came G.I. Joe, ever innovative, ready to do his duty, and of course, make a buck.

Civilians hungered for the cigarettes, chocolate, coffee and sugar only had by us. A small black market was inevitable. We found humor in the strangest places and love with less difficulty. My beautiful Sicilian bride, Angelina, was my only war booty. From the disaster of war sprang the beauty of our steadfast love, enjoyed for many, many years thereafter.

REMARKABLE BOOKS TO ENJOY AGAIN AND AGAIN. ORDER YOURS TODAY!

its past (or else wallowing in it) since well before the climactic disaster. “[I]t’s a great place to be from. And a great place to come back to, once in a while,” explains the protagonist of “Le Vie En Rose Construction Co.,” one of the older “selected” stories and perhaps the best here. He continues, “The creative possibilities here seemed endless. And so did the destructive.”

The destructive dominates the creative in these stories, though they are slapstick as often as tragic (and sometimes both, in a way specific to the city). Though the subtitle isn’t as specific as it could be, the book has two sections: The first offers 10 new stories followed by 10 taken from Perpetual Care (2008). Black or white, gay or straight, male or female, young or (often) old, the characters exist in what the author sees as a world unto itself, one that those who leave can never really escape and those who return have trouble recognizing as home. In “Hard Freeze,” a virtuoso pianist with a French mother and an AfricanAmerican father returns to the city to make peace with his late father and discovers deep roots he never knew he had: “Here in New Orleans, with its French history and African blood lines, where he had long dreamed he would melt in like chocolate, he felt particularly foreign,” though he later realizes how much of the city is within him. There are stories of sexual predators and innocent prey, of rich fathers and the sons who have disappointed them, of elderly residents who have seen their city disappear and who often become lost in memories.

The author plainly knows and loves his city well and deserves a readership beyond his regional renown.

triangle that forms among Clive, Vanessa and her sister after the birth of the first Bell child. Vanessa, the artist, emerges as “an ocean of majestic calm,” almost infinitely tolerant of her sister, the writer, whose capricious, jealous nature, though tempered by intellectual brilliance and immense charm, tips over at times into madness and suicidal thoughts. This fictional Virginia is far less appealing than her sister, whose nuanced account of her shifting feelings for Clive and eventual love for another invites sympathy. Leonard Woolf ’s arrival marks the beginning of the next episode in the group’s extraordinarily intertwined history.

Not exactly uncharted territory, but Parmar enters it with passion and precision, delivering a sensitive, superior soap opera of celebrated lives.

THE UNDYING

Reid, Ethan Simon451 (272 pp.) $4.99 e-book | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-4767-7314-8 In Reid’s debut horror novel, an unstable young woman gets in touch with her inner survivor—at the expense of the entire human population.

Jeanie has come to Paris with her best friend, Ben, to celebrate the New Year and a new beginning. She’s mourning the recent death of her father and hopes her French friends will help her move on and embrace life. Instead, at midnight, the power goes out, and by morning, Paris is engulfed in a fiery apocalypse. Jeanie and her friends fight their way through the city trying to find salvation, along the way adopting an orphaned newborn who gives them hope and the strength to survive not only earthquakes, but also the mysterious moribund, undead vampiric creatures who feed on both emotions and human flesh. Reid makes liberal use of the end-of-chapter cliffhanger, and the novel moves compellingly at first, driven by the mystery of both the creatures and the origin of the devastation as well as graphic descriptions of Paris in flames. Ultimately, however, the story loses momentum and human interest. Reid’s thematic insistence on “fate” feels instead like “boredom” as each character meets his or her expected end. The end-of-world imagery (rising temperatures, etc.) and monster creepiness cancel each other out.

Watching Paris burn is oddly sentimental, and the heroine has teeth, but by the end, it’s all just too exhausting.

(Agent: Barbara Poelle)

VANESSA AND HER SISTER

Parmar, Priya Ballantine (368 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-8041-7637-8 A devoted, emotionally intense portrait of the Bloomsbury group focuses in particular on sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship is tested to the breaking point by their competing affections for two men.

Plunging into her story—the lives, love affairs, intellectual debates, arguments and achievements of an extensive, creative group of English friends—Parmar (Exit the Actress, 2011) allows the background facts about her real-life characters to emerge as needed. The curious, comfortably middle-class menage of the four orphaned Stephen siblings—Adrian, Thoby, Vanessa and Virginia—living together in a large house in central London in the early 20th century is the foundation of the book. It’s in this house that Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and many others congregate for bohemian evenings.

Bell falls in love with Vanessa; Strachey is a friend of Leonard Woolf, who will eventually return from the Colonies to marry Virginia. Narrated by Vanessa in diary format, punctuated, as if in a scrapbook, by letters, tickets, bills and postcards, this slice of fictional biography spans the years 1905-12, in particular the 26

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“Unlike the author’s later allegories, this is more of a dark romantic comedy with philosophical undertones, set in an apartment building occupied by six families.” from skylight

SKYLIGHT

his struggling days, and didn’t want it published during his lifetime.

Since his death in 2010, it’s been well-received wherever it’s been published, suggesting that quality was not the issue. Unlike the author’s later allegories, this is more of a dark romantic comedy with philosophical undertones, set in an apartment building occupied by six families. A cobbler and his wife, the only happy couple here, take in a young lodger who has a sense of his destiny unfettered by the usual entanglements: “I have the sense that life, real life, is hidden behind a curtain, roaring with laughter at our efforts to get to know it. And I want to know life.” Occupying the other apartments are two married couples, a kept woman, two young sisters with their mother and aunt, and a family with a beautiful young daughter. After introducing all these characters in a confusing rush, the novel lets the reader sort them out as various entanglements reveal themselves, some more interesting than others. Ultimately, the young boarder comes to suspect that “the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning.”

More conventional and less political than the later work that established the author’s reputation but an early sign of considerable promise and spirited storytelling.

Saramago, José Translated by Costa, Margaret Jull Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (288 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-544-09002-6 Rarely has a novel with a publication delayed as long as this one’s proven such a pleasure.

The so-called “Lost Novel” by the Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese author has a peculiar history. Saramago (Blindness, 1995, etc.) submitted the book, likely written in the late 1940s or early ’50s, for publication in 1953. He never received an acceptance or rejection from the publisher; instead, the manuscript by the then-unknown novelist just sat there. It didn’t resurface until 1989, when the publisher discovered the manuscript while moving offices and informed the now-renowned author that it would be eager to publish this early work. He refused, apparently because it was a painful reminder of

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“This is a splendid story filled with betrayal and disaster. Readers prone to schadenfreude will find it doubly delicious.” from the family hightower

THE FAMILY HIGHTOWER

individual signature pieces.” Yoli looks back over time, realizing that the sisters’ bond is strengthened by their painful memories. The girls’ father baffles neighbors by supporting Elf ’s creative passions and campaigning to run a library. His suicide and absence from their adulthood make him even more important to his daughters as their paths diverge. Elf travels around Europe, emptying herself into Rachmaninoff performances; Yoli writes books about a rodeo heroine, feeling aimless and failed. Elf ’s husband appreciates her singular sensitivity as a performer, but this capacity for vulnerability dangerously underpins her many breakdowns and longstanding depression. Yoli’s men are transient, leaving her with two children. Toews conveys family cycles of crisis and intermittent calm through recurring events and behaviors: Elf and her father both suffer from depression; Yoli and her mother face tragedy with wry humor and absurdist behavior; and two sisters experience parallel losses. Crisp chapter endings, like staccato musical notes, anchor the plot’s pacing.

Elf ’s determination to end her suffering by dying takes the form of a drumbeat of requests for Yoli to help her commit suicide.

Readers yearn for more time with this complex, radiant woman who fiercely loves her family but cannot love herself.

“Sadness is what holds our bones in place,” Yoli thinks.

Toews deepens our understanding of the pain found in Coleridge’s poetry, which is the source of the book’s title.

(This review was first published in the Fall Preview 2014 issue.)

Slattery, Brian Francis Seven Stories (336 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-60980-563-0 A tale dripping with blood and money in a family that’s far more fun to read about than it would be to live with.

“So listen,” the narrator begins, and you feel like he’s confiding in you about a bunch of crooks he knows. But no, he’s “selling them out to you” as though he’s more snitch than storyteller. “There is blood everywhere,” he assures “dear reader” near the beginning, and in due time, it’s a promise amply kept. What else to expect from people who make some of their riches from involuntary organ donors? The bulk of the story takes place in Cleveland, with side trips to Ukraine. Cleveland is “a city built to make money and a city that money built, built and took apart, again and again.” There are two cousins named Peter Hightower. One is a journalist, and one, Petey, is a criminal who evolves from Petro Garko to Pete the Uke to Peter Henry Hightower, falsely claiming to have gone to Yale. “How much money does my family have?” asks the other Peter Hightower. The answer is that they stopped counting long ago. Their grandfather was a thug with deep Ukrainian roots. The criminal tradition continues in Cleveland, with the women just as vicious as the men—but will that be enough against a rival named The Wolf? Slattery goes into rich digressions such as the fatal Sugar Ray Robinson–Jim Doyle fight, and he does them so well the reader doesn’t care that they’re only tangential to the storyline. And one could fill a page with all the novel’s quotable lines; “I love you means I will bleed you dry” tops the list.

This is a splendid story filled with betrayal and disaster. Readers prone to schadenfreude will find it doubly delicious.

ISLAND FOG

Vanderslice, John Lavender Ink (300 pp.) $17.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2014 978-1-935084-41-9 Two centuries of strange on Nantucket Island.

In Vanderslice’s new collection, the eponymous fog is a metaphor for moral ambiguity. “Guilty Look” provides an early (set in 1795) example of bankers exploiting the justice system for personal gain. In “King Philip’s War” (1823), the uneasy friendship of two boys, white and Indian, echoes the detente between their respective populations.

Orpha, who has heard nothing of her whaler husband, Reuben, for more than three years, happily gives up on him in “On Cherry Street” (1837). In “Taste” (1846), Gideon, a once-promising ship’s captain, has worked as a night watchman for almost three decades, since his ship was wrecked by a sperm whale. In weeks adrift on a small boat, Gideon resorted to cannibalism, a “taste” which has not left him since. On Vanderslice’s Nantucket, modernity does nothing to mediate the macabre, menacing and mysterious. In “How Long Will You Tarry?” (1920), a black schoolteacher descended from the island’s African settlers encounters an eerie reminder of incipient racial prejudice on her walk home. A plumber is forced to face the truth about the only woman who loved him in “Morning Meal” (1999). The increasingly upscale Nantucket of the 2000s harbors even more danger. In “Beaten,” a vacationer’s daily run becomes a

ALL MY PUNY SORROWS

Toews, Miriam McSweeney’s (330 pp.) $24.00 | Nov. 6, 2014 978-1-940450-27-8 A Canadian writer visits her older sister, a concert pianist who’s just attempted suicide, in this masterful, original investigation into love, loss and survival.

“She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other,” Yolandi Von Riesen says of her sister, Elfrieda. Toews (Irma Voth, 2011, etc.) moves between Winnipeg, Toronto, and a small town founded

by Mennonite immigrants who survived Bolshevik massacres, where the intellectual, free-spirited Von Riesen family doesn’t share the elders’ disapproval of “overt symbols of hope and 28

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THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE

nightmare as a stranger dogs his steps like a Nike-clad fury. A gay man suddenly summoned off island by a fickle Bostonian lover weighs his options while a nightly, ghostly presence weighs down his chest in “Haunted.” The title of “Newfoundland” suggests the longed-for escape of a successful auto dealer whose social-climbing wife is bankrupting him. Hosanna, a Jamaican single mother who’s trying to survive with her two children by running a snack shop, finds her precarious security further undermined by the woman she trusted to manage the slacker summer help in “Managing Business.” In the supremely unsettling title story, Doug, another slacker, finds himself drawn into a Faustian bargain with a uniquely New England twist.

A spellbinding collection that explodes every anodyne myth about Nantucket while fostering some new ones.

Wittliff, Bill Illus. by Unruh, Jack Univ. of Texas (224 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-292-75995-4

A Texas boy goes searching for his missing momma in an endearing picaresque that evokes Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and a whole passel of folk tales.

The narrator of this extended shaggy dog story, the first in a series, is Papa, who’s recalling his boyhood in central Texas in the 1880s. His mother has escaped the clutches of his domineering father, Old Karl, and Papa is quickly separated not just from both parents but from his brother as well. So begins the oldest story ever told—a youngster heads off on a journey—but the familiarity of the novel’s setup is countered by the rounded, quirky, sometimes-creepy characters Papa encounters and the warmth of Wittliff’s down-home prose. The secondary cast includes Papa’s newborn half brother, whose bird-shaped birthmark holds an oracular power for those around him; Fritz, a stray dog with a strange laughing bark; Calley, a cowboy who’s at once a walking essay in conditional ethics and a father figure to the boy; and Pepe and Peto, Mexican laborers who’ve also escaped Old Karl’s heavy hand. Wittliff, who’s written screenplays for Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall, knows his Texas tropes backward and forward. Some of those tropes are overly familiar, and characters tend to appear and disappear in ways that strain credulity. But here too Wittliff knows what he’s doing: The novel is less a grab bag of episodes and symbols (though it is that) than a sophisticated consideration of interconnectedness, an idea he tinkers with on practical and metaphysical levels. The elliptical story climaxes at the ridge of the novel’s title, giving the book the feel of an old-fashioned cliffhanger in its closing pages. Wittliff’s Huck-ish voice sometimes runs on a bit long, but he’s a font of well-told wisdom, and Unruh’s illustrations show key moments in the story with appropriately warped perspective and detail.

An unpretentious but smart reboot of Wild West storytelling.

THORN Stories

Williams, Evan Morgan BkMk/Univ. of Missouri (204 pp.) $15.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-886157-94-1 An aptly titled collection of 15 short stories whose characters can be rather prickly indeed.

Williams sets a number of his stories in the Southwest, both on and off Native American reservations, and we frequently sense nostalgia there.

In “The Great Black Shape in the Water,” the opening story, the narrator takes pride in his mother’s strength, for she was able to lift the tail flukes of a beach-stranded whale. She was a member of the Quihwa tribe in Washington state, a band that by the end of the story we’re informed no longer existed. Like many of the narratives in the collection, this is a story about stories, about storytelling and even about myth-making. “Morsel” features a very different narrator, a college dropout spending the summer alone at her family’s cabin and working as a hostess at a local restaurant. She falls desperately in love with Sean, the twicemarried chef who provides her with leftover food and plenty of physical affection. Unfortunately, she finds out he’s rather indiscriminate in sharing that affection with others, though by the end of the story she’s no less in love with him. In “Grey,” Williams further focuses on the tension between loneliness and relationships. Here, a college professor shares his love of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, as well as his sexual favors, with his students. On hearing of the death by breast cancer of a former professor of his, he recalls a time when he was 20 and had an affair with this professor as she was teaching him to love Archilochus’ poetry. “The Limousine in My Life” is a brilliant portrait of the 1950s, when the narrator has childhood memories of live nuclear tests, of tract housing, of his mother’s anger when his father came home one evening having bought a “limousine” in the form of a 1949 Dodge Coronado.

Williams has a facility for getting inside characters and exposing their essential isolation and loneliness.

I DID NOT KILL MY HUSBAND

Zhenyun, Liu Translated by Goldblatt, Howard; Li-Chun-Lin, Sylvia Arcade (224 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 16, 2014 978-1-62872-426-4 What’s a couple to do when they’re expecting their second child in China?

Simple. Divorce and get remarried to avoid the one-child policy.

But nothing is as simple as it seems in this wickedly subtle satire by acclaimed Chinese writer Liu (Cellphone, 2011, etc.). |

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After the divorce, protagonist Li Xuelian’s husband, Qin Yuhe, marries someone else. Enraged, Li Xuelian goes to court to have the divorce declared a sham. Throw in a lovelorn chef and a cast of judges and politicians who run the gamut from bumbling to suave, and you get a piercing examination of the intersection of politics and human nature that loops from villagers to the bigwigs of Beijing. Liu writes with a colloquial voice reminiscent of old men gossiping, which adds an absurd twist to his keen dissections—he compares politicians vying for a promotion to “three dozen monkeys fighting over a single grape.” Yet his explorations of his characters’ motives are so finely detailed they border on the compassionate. His moments of tragedy are punctuated by comedy, his comedy underscored by tragedy. By the end, it’s hard to know who exactly is being skewered: the government, which is more victim than villain, or ordinary citizens whose kooky brilliance elevates them into politicians fighting for grapes in their own rights.

Either way, Liu has written a masterful tale that will make you laugh even as you despair. His words are simple but they will linger in your memory long after you have finished.

Parisian tunnels and into the famous Pere-Lachaise Cemetery before they discover the bizarre truth.

One of Lady Emily’s most interesting cases (Behind the Shattered Glass, 2013, etc.). The Victorian detail enhances the difficulties of proving someone dead or alive and discovering a killer with none of the usual motives for murder.

HONOR ABOVE ALL

Bard-Collins, J. Allium Press (312 pp.) $17.99 paper | $6.99 e-book Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-9890535-7-0 978-0-9890535-8-7 e-book A Pinkerton agent vows to avenge his partner.

Garrett Lyons arrives in Chicago with the body of Sam Wilkerson, his mentor and partner. Lyons is a Civil War veteran who was kicked out of the Army when a Cheyenne ambush killed all his men. His fellow officer Elliott Caultrain took the credit for Lyons’ heroics and stuck him with the blame. After Lyons hunts down and wounds forger Theo Brock, who he thinks murdered Wilkerson, he’s fired by the Pinkertons, who are more interested in making a deal to find a large number of counterfeit $20 bills and government bearer bonds. So Lyons turns for comfort to his friends in Chicago. Charlotte Reid is a widow well-known for her highclass poker games; famous architect Louis Henri Sullivan plans to help Lyons with another job he’s been pressured into doing for his former commander. Gen. Stannard’s insurance company is in trouble after his partner runs up big gambling debts, including one to Lyons. So the general asks Lyons to make sure a building is finished on time before the bank takes possession of it, along with the general’s money. Lyons realizes he has the wrong man in Brock and finds that keeping the building site on track is no easy task. Ever since an 1871 fire destroyed much of Chicago, it’s been the fastest growing city in the nation, and the enormous sums of money to be made there have attracted every crooked politician and confidence trickster in hopes of getting rich quick. To top it off, Lyons’ nemesis Caultrain, in town for a GAR reunion, seems to be involved in still another case with no end of complications.

Bard-Collins’ detailed knowledge of building, architecture and Chicago history forms a solid base for a debut showcasing a hero reminiscent of Sam Spade.

m ys t e r y THE COUNTERFEIT HEIRESS

Alexander, Tasha Minotaur (304 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-250-02469-5 978-1-250-02468-8 e-book An aristocratic sleuth takes on a highly unusual case.

Invited with her husband, Colin, to a masquerade ball at Devonshire House in honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Lady Emily Hargreaves dresses as Artemis. So does another one of the guests. Emily’s friend Cecile du Lac has been told the second Artemis is her old friend Estella Lamar, who’s been traveling the world for years. When she approaches her, however, Cecile realizes that the woman is an impostor who flees, only to be found murdered. Who was the intended victim, the impostor or Estella? Taking on the case, the dashing Hargreaves duo travel to Paris trying to track down Estella, who occasionally sends missives to the lawyer who handles her money. But she’s been seen only in blurry pictures from all over the globe.

Estella maintains several houses, each run as if she may return at any moment, but Emily begins to wonder if the elusive heiress is even alive. A mysterious auburn-haired man warns them off with ever escalating threats as they try to follow the money trail to locate Estella. Although they’re trying to unmask a murderer, Estella’s disappearance is so compelling that it becomes their primary focus and leads them through miles of underground 30

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THE REST IS SILENCE

pay dirt when she goes back several years to the death of Diana Allman, one of the office’s secretaries. Diana was killed at home, and her husband, James, served prison time for her murder. Was there more to her story than a simple domestic dispute? Does someone blame the ME’s office for mishandling the autopsy and forensic investigation of the death of one of their own? Theresa needs to find answers fast, because the killer has set his or her sights on Theresa’s colleague and friend, DNA analyst Don Delgado, and on Theresa herself.

By releasing surprises little by little, Black manages to fit both a whodunit and a police-chase thriller into a single bagged-and-tagged package.

Benn, James R. Soho Crime (336 pp.) $26.95 | $14.99 e-book | Oct. 2, 2014 978-1-61695-266-2 978-1-61695-267-9 e-book An unidentified corpse on the southwest coast of England throws a wrench into D-Day planning. Can Capt. Billy Boyle identify the victim and crack the case?

April 23, 1944. Allied forces are gathered in Kingsbridge, waiting for the go-ahead to swarm the beaches of Normandy, but a body on the beach threatens to disrupt their sensitive timetable. Boston cop–turned–Army investigator Boyle (Death’s Door, 2012, etc.) is called in to investigate, along with his melancholy partner, Piotr Augustus Kazimierz. The local coroner, Dr. Verniquet, confirms that the body has been in the water for more than a month and offers the opinion that the victim was a petty criminal of some sort. Billy wonders whether the dead man had darker designs, perhaps on Gen. Eisenhower, who’s supervising the big maneuver and makes a cameo appearance. Billy’s suspicions deepen when a sniper fires at him and Kaz, who end up pinned by their overturned jeep. Their probe gains traction when Billy decides to follow the money by determining who stood to profit most from foiling the D-Day invasion. The investigation leads the pair to some slick and colorful gangsters at a racetrack as well as the dining room of British society’s upper crust, where additional murders complicate the case.

Billy’s ninth case moves a bit too deliberately and may have too many red herrings, but his whiz-bang first-person narrative keeps the story afloat, and its Greatest Generation plot gives it an appealing sense of nostalgia.

DEATH IN ELYSIUM

Cutler, Judith Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8396-4

A rector’s wife faces a tough adjustment to Kentish village life.

After a long, lucrative business career in London, Jodie Harcourt unexpectedly finds love when she accompanies a friend on a blind date. Marriage to country parson Theo Welsh has more than its share of challenges. Of course, Jodie could fix up the inadequate kitchen in the dreary rectory with a wave of her MasterCard. She even has the means to rescue the failing village store and reopen the shuttered youth center. But, fearful that the wary villagers will reject a free-spending Lady Bountiful, she confines her efforts to engaging some of Lesser Hogben’s disaffected youth. She hires Bernard Hammond, known to one and all as “Burble,” to clean up the rectory gardens, challenges his friend Malcolm “Mazza” Burns to join her on her daily runs, and invites Mazza’s sister, Martine, to design a village website. Her efforts reap the scorn of the more conservative members of the parish council, particularly poncy vestryman Ted Vesey and perennial naysayer Ida Mountford. Even Elaine Grant, who wins Jodie’s heart by teaching her to bake, expresses doubts about her efforts. And when Burble disappears, taking with him Jodie’s expensive camera, she fears her critics may be right. But she also fears for Burble’s safety, especially after her cousin, ex-DCI Dave Harcourt, is felled by a tripwire while inspecting a local construction site.

Is Elysian Fields more than just the installation of cow barns Elaine insists? Jodie must fight her instinct to flee back to her flat in St. John’s Wood to find out.

Once Cutler establishes her throughline about the struggles of a country parson’s wife, she may do better than the perfunctory puzzle she offers in likable Jodie’s debut.

CLOSE TO THE BONE

Black, Lisa Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8402-2

A forensic scientist investigates a murder at her own morgue.

As accustomed as Theresa MacLean is to bodily fluids, it still gives her quite a jolt to discover a trail of blood in the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office. Even worse is her discovery of the body of desk man Darryl Johnson, covered in blood, with the word “Confess” written in blood on the wall above him. But whoever has it in for the ME’s office isn’t done yet. Concerned that Dr. Hubert Reese, one of the unit’s pathologists, doesn’t answer his phone, Theresa goes to his spacious Fairmount Boulevard home and finds him bleeding to death. Now Theresa’s inclined to regard the death of any ME office employee as suspicious. She looks into the demise of ambulance crew member George Bain, a retired cop who succumbed to a heart attack within his first year at his new job. And she hits |

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“A police officer and a museum curator each try to solve a separate murder case while maintaining their romantic relationship.” from tradition of deceit

FORGET YOU EVER KNEW ME

It’s all very hush-hush, except that it isn’t, as Malko quickly learns on his arrival. Just as the CIA has moles like Luftullah Kibzai inside Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, Karzai has moles like former station director Mark Spider inside the CIA, and soon everyone in Kabul seems to know why Malko is there—except for Alicia Burton, the clueless American reporter who seduces Malko after his fiancee, Alexandra, and South African automotive expert Maureen Kieffer have already had their ways with him. Complications naturally arise, and soon Malko is himself on the run from his many enemies and from a few people he considered allies. The aptly titled tale, proficient but synthetic, is punctuated by bouts of sex as graphic as they are routine.

As for the thrills in this ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, if you want to know whether Malko succeeds in assassinating Karzai, or whether de Villiers kills off his long-running series hero, you’ll just have to read the whole story to find out.

Dailey, Judy Five Star (274 pp.) $25.95 | Nov. 19, 2014 978-1-4328-2948-3

A 1950s doctor finds her considerable talents unappreciated in Zillah, Indiana.

Maggie Kendall loves her job at a women’s clinic in Chicago; her physician husband, Bennett, wants to return to his hometown and follow in the footsteps of his father. Bennett presses Maggie, telling her that it’ll be a better home for their daughter, Ellie, and that Maggie can help underprivileged people in Zillah. But the powers that be refuse to grant her hospital privileges, and Bennett’s mother loathes her. Passionate about her commitment to help people who can’t afford medical care, Maggie’s shocked to discover that she stands accused of scheming to bring socialized medicine to Zillah, a town where racism runs rampant and women are considered stay-at-home-mother material. Despite the opposition, she opens a women’s clinic financed by an organization trying to bring better health care to rural areas. Then the clinic is burned to the ground, and Maggie’s left with a single friend, an ambitious young aide to a right-wing politician who helps her cover up a dubious death. Flash-forward to 1992, when a maid is found dead and a dog badly injured in a motel room rented by one Margaret Mueller Kendall. Ellie, now grown and married to a college professor, thought her mother had died years ago.

Long-buried secrets threaten to come to light—secrets that may be the death of Maggie, and Ellie too.

Despite a general lack of mystery, this sophomore case from Dailey (Animal, Vegetable, Murder, 2013) depicts the good old days in a way that may make your blood boil as you ask how much things have really changed.

TRADITION OF DECEIT

Ernst, Kathleen Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (360 pp.) $14.99 paper | Nov. 8, 2014 978-0-7387-4078-2 A police officer and a museum curator each try to solve a separate murder case while maintaining their romantic relationship.

Chloe Ellefson and Roelke McKenna have come to an engagement party for Roelke’s former Milwaukee PD partner and close friend Rick Almirez. Roelke can tell that Chloe is not enjoying herself, and they part uneasily after returning home to Palmyra, where Roelke now works. Before the night is over, Roelke gets a call telling him Rick has been shot dead. Returning to Milwaukee, he discovers that Rick had been accused of drinking on the job.

Roelke has such a bad feeling about the investigation that he gets a leave to investigate the killing on his own. Chloe, meanwhile, has gone to the Twin Cities, where her graduate school friend Ariel Grzegorczyk is having trouble coming up with the information she needs for a grant she’s working on for the Minnesota Historical Society to turn an abandoned flour mill— now a crumbling hulk, home to street people, drug dealers and prostitutes—into a museum. On a visit to the mill, Chloe and Ariel discover the body of industrial historian and professor Everett Whyte, Ariel’s Ph.D. adviser. Back in Milwaukee, evidence shows that the gun used to kill Rick came from the police evidence stores. Now Roelke trusts no one, especially after he’s shot at and almost killed. His only clue is a fugitive from domestic violence who worked at the bar where Rick was seen drinking. Violence against women also seems to be involved in Chloe’s investigation, as it is in a back story about Polish immigrants who worked in the mill from the 1870s to the 1920s.

The latest case for Chloe (Heritage of Darkness, 2013, etc.) provides informative historical facts, two good mysteries, and the trials and tribulations of a difficult relationship.

CHAOS IN KABUL

de Villiers, Gérard Translated by Rodarmor, William Vintage (384 pp.) $14.95 paper | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-8041-6933-2 How hard could it be to assassinate an inconvenient Afghan head of state?

If you haven’t seen any newspapers over the past few years, de Villiers, late (19292013) veteran of hundreds of spy thrillers,

wants to tell you.

Hamid Karzai has become more trouble than he’s worth. So National Security Advisor John Mulligan and CIA Deputy Director Clayton Luger decide he’s got to go. Since the White House needs complete deniability, they farm the job out to Austrian Prince Malko Linge, a freelance operative who’s already done yeoman service (The Madmen of Benghazi, 2014, etc.), and instruct him to use South African mercenary Nelson Berry as the triggerman.

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AND GRANT YOU PEACE

the path of Steve Donovan’s fists on the night Donovan’s patron, hawkish Sen. Patrick O’Shay, presents him as a promising Congressional candidate. The next morning, Donovan is found beaten to death, and in the blink of an eye, deceptively friendly Police Chief Foster (“call me Paul”) arrests Will for murder. Sam, who’s as certain as Will’s wife, Karen, that Foster’s holding the wrong man, turns over other rocks in Black River Falls to see what’s hiding under them. His suspicions fall on Lon Anders, Donovan’s rapacious new business partner, and on Valerie Donovan, a widow who’s one piece of work. As usual, there are plenty of other guilty secrets to discover. The final revelation, however, will take most readers by surprise, even if some of them are still scratching their heads after the curtain comes down.

The Vietnam War era puts the damper on Gorman’s usual generosity in strewing period detail but engages a deeper passion: “The war was not only destroying people overseas, it was destroying them back in my hometown.”

Flora, Kate Five Star (330 pp.) $25.95 | Oct. 22, 2014 978-1-4328-2939-1

A fire in a mosque provides new ways to put the sorely tried Sgt. Joe Burgess of the Portland Police Department to ever more challenging tests.

There’s not much Burgess can tell about what’s happened. He knows there’s a fire at the mosque because a brave and resourceful foster child, Jason Stetson, tells him about it while it’s still blazing. He knows that someone locked a young woman and a baby in a closet and left them to die—a wish all too completely fulfilled in the infant’s case. He knows the surviving young woman, lying in a hospital bed at Maine Medical Center, is too traumatized to say a word and that Imam Muhamud Ibrahim has ordered his followers, many of them family members, not to say anything either. And he knows that the mosque has become the center of a violent power struggle that’s entangled unsavory Kimani Yates, whose visit to the hospital terrifies the mute young woman with good reason; William “Butcher” Flaherty, the eye-patched Iron Angel biker whose business with the imam remains shadowy; and property mogul Addison Westerly, whose shell company owns the mosque he’s been at pains to distance himself from. But “the meanest cop in Portland” (Redemption, 2012, etc.) doesn’t know how the pieces of this jigsaw fit together or who the dead baby is or how to resolve the racial and cultural tensions that swirl around the mosque or even how to keep his live-in lover, Chris Perlin, and his suddenly growing family safe from the fallout.

As usual, Flora pours on the intensity for both her police detective and his fans in this criminal, legal and moral maze whose center is clearly a locked closet in a burning mosque but whose boundaries remain frustratingly hazy even at the fade-out.

SAFARI

Hall, Parnell Pegasus Crime (336 pp.) $25.95 | Nov. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-637-1 A group of tourists on safari find themselves in danger not from wild beasts but from a murderer among them.

Stanley Hastings and his wife, Alice, are ready to set off on Alice’s dream trip, financed by years of saving and a small inheritance and planned by Alice down to the smallest detail.

A bump up to business class makes some of their future accommodations seem pretty shabby, but the wisecracking Stanley, a private eye who works for an ambulance-chasing lawyer, is determined to do whatever it takes to keep Alice happy. The expedition, run by Clemson Safari, starts off in Zambia, where the couple meets their fellow travelers. The first stop is an upscale lodge, where they soon see wildlife and a dead spotter.

At first he seems to have been killed by a falling sausage fruit, but Stanley notices that the wound was caused by something sharp, not blunt. Discovering a bloody stick, he reports it to Clemson, but it vanishes before they can retrieve it. When one of the group is found dead after asking questions, Stanley can see that she was poisoned. Even Clemson, whose business’ success rests on a razor’s edge, knows he has to get the police involved. Asking Stanley to investigate, Clemson quickly moves the group to Zimbabwe in hopes of finishing the safari before the police and the American embassy get involved. Self-deprecating Stanley, who’s taken all this time just to learn the names of his companions, has little hope of solving the crimes, but he has to try.

In his 19th appearance, Stanley (Stakeout, 2013, etc.) once more faces a case he’s convinced is too tough for him.

Hall complements his struggles with amusing repartee and enough red herrings to keep it interesting.

RIDERS ON THE STORM

Gorman, Ed Pegasus Crime (252 pp.) $25.95 | Oct. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-625-8

This sequel to Sam McCain’s eighth case, Ticket to Ride (2010), originally announced as his last, has got to be great news for fans of the sharpest investigator in yesteryear Iowa.

An accident’s sent Sam back home from Fort Hood and boot camp. Though he’s spent months recovering in a hospital, he’s one of the luckiest young men of 1971. He didn’t make it to Vietnam; he didn’t come home in a body bag or minus his legs, like Greg Egan, or minus an arm, like Ted Franks.

And he didn’t accidentally kill a Vietnamese girl like Will Cullen, who’s retreated into a trauma zone all his own. When Will joins John Kerry in opposing the war, his position puts him squarely in |

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DARKNESS, DARKNESS

exhibition, but really it’s an attempt to try to sweet-talk him into coming back temporarily to teach. After thinking it over, Chris agrees to Birtwhistle’s posthumous request. He’s taught at BAA once before, and he’s eager to rejoin old colleagues like Elisabeth Kroog, the elderly, irascible, pipe-smoking sculptor who mangles his name and everyone else’s. He even agrees to help administrator Claire Kilburn set up the exhibition, and soon painters Dawn Fowling and Kurt Hufnagel set up their easels at BAA. Sculptor Rachel Eade works on her installation on the school’s grounds. Only Greg Landacker, the most prestigious of the invitees, prefers to work on his own at The Old Forge, his posh studio in Motterton. But all hell eventually breaks loose, as break-ins, vandalism, and mysterious butterflyshaped graffiti invade not only BAA, but the artists’ private spaces. All too soon, it looks as if Honeysett will have to put away his palette and whip out his surveillance camera, as the mischief escalates to murder.

The mystery itself is nothing more than a curlicue in a jam-packed Hieronymus Bosch canvas filled with the good, the bad and the just plain wacky.

Harvey, John Pegasus Crime (352 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-616-6

In his last case, former DI Charlie Resnick revisits a mystery from his own past in Harvey’s moving and moody 12th series installment.

The discovery of a body under concrete at a Nottinghamshire home ignites a long-dormant investigation: the search for answers concerning the disappearance—and now murder—of Jenny Hardwick in 1984. Thirty years ago, Resnick was a newly promoted DI amid the increasingly violent British Miners’ Strike and the growing hatred for Margaret Thatcher. He ran undercover operations, sending coppers disguised as union sympathizers into the ranks of the protesters to gather intel. Now, three decades later, he’s officially retired but working as a civilian investigator when the skeletonized remains are identified as Jenny Hardwick. DI Catherine Njoroge, a friend of Resnick’s in the East Midlands Serious Organised Crime Unit, lands the cold case and asks Resnick for help given his familiarity with the tense months of the strike. While women joining the striking miners was not unusual, Jenny’s situation was complicated by the fact that her husband, Barry, still worked in the mines, dividing their household into “scab” and protester. Harvey (Cold in Hand, 2008, etc.) seamlessly weaves together the present-day investigation into Jenny’s death—a process complicated by not only the passage of time, but also the lingering distrust stirred up by the strike and its aftermath—and the last weeks of Jenny’s life.

As Resnick revisits one of Britain’s most painful events, he wrestles mightily with his own grief over the death of his girlfriend and struggles with the inevitability of his finite time as a detective.

WOULDN’T IT BE DEADLY

Ireland, D.E. Minotaur (336 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Sep. 23, 2014 978-1-250-04935-3 978-1-4668-5035-4 e-book A flower girl–turned–speech coach stops polishing vowels long enough to solve several murders in a series debut that picks up just short of where Shaw’s Pygmalion left off.

Eight months after her triumph at the Embassy Ball, Eliza Doolittle has learned enough from world-renowned speech expert Henry Higgins to go into business for herself—or at least as an assistant to Higgins’ chief rival, Emil Nepommuck. After a day of giving phonetic lessons to social climbers in London’s fashionable Belgrave Square, Eliza hears a noise in the dark as she’s leaving her office and is startled by someone rushing past her, leaving behind a gold button. Then, at a grand reception, Eliza witnesses a ruckus at the announcement of Nepommuck’s engagement to the Dowager Marchioness of Gresham, who’s easily twice the Hungarian count’s age. The nuptials, alas, are not to be: Eliza finds Nepommuck stabbed to death in his office and becomes the first suspect herself. Luckily for her, her cousin is the detective inspector on the case, and he releases her.

His next suspect, however, is Higgins, who remains stubbornly secretive about where he was the day of the murder. He’s not the only one withholding information. Nepommuck was blackmailing people who were hiding secrets, and the list grows as Eliza tries to find the owner of the mysterious button and clear Higgins. Even her pluck, as well as loving descriptions of Edwardian fashion and the presence of Col. Pickering and Freddy Eynsford Hill, can’t offset the tale’s feeble wit and soppy subplots. Fans of the original may be curious to know what happens next, but

INDELIBLE

Helton, Peter Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8423-7 A free-wheeling painter accepts a short-term assignment as a tutor at a bedeviled art academy.

Painting doesn’t always pay the cost of running Mill House, the three acres of dilapidated buildings Chris Honeysett (Worthless Remains, 2013, etc.) shares with fellow artist Annis Jordan. That is, when Annis isn’t also bestowing her favors on Tim Bigwood, the third partner in Aqua Investigations, Chris’ bread-and-butter job. Unusually, this time, it’s detective work that gets put on the back burner. John Birtwhistle, owner of Bath Arts Academy, keels over dead at the wheel of his Volvo while ostensibly on his way to invite Chris to participate in an 34

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TEL AVIV NOIR

true Shaw devotees will wish they could unread this ill-conceived sequel, especially when it descends into slapstick and a denouement so clichéd that it’s even announced as such.

The two authors writing together as Ireland must have known that the tradeoff for a ready-made back story and brand-name characters would be comparisons with the characters’ creator—but did they know how short they would fall?

Keret, Etgar; Gavron, Assaf—Eds. Translated by Greenspan, Yardenne Akashic (280 pp.) $26.95 | $15.95 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-61775-315-2 978-1-61665-154-7 paper 978-1-61775-335-0 e-book Even in the Holy Land, people find ingenious ways to screw up their own lives, as the latest entry in Akashic’s Noir

WANT YOU DEAD

James, Peter Minotaur (416 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Nov. 18, 2014 978-1-250-03020-7 978-1-250-03021-4 e-book

series proves.

Tel Aviv is a modern city in an ancient land. It has clubs where 20-year-olds like Essy and Danielle, in Julie Fermentto’s “Who’s a Good Boy!,” get drunk, bum cigarettes from strangers and look for love in all the wrong places. It has technology, like the electronic surveillance in Silje Bekeng’s “Swirl” and the computer Gideon Tzuk uses to watch pornography in Gon Ben Ari’s “Clear Recent History,” unaware that it’s watching him back. But its heartbeat is its people, looking to thrive or maybe just survive. In “Sleeping Mask,” by Gadi Taub, Shiri takes a new look at the world’s oldest profession to clear her father’s gambling debts. Srulik, in co-editor Gavron’s “Center,” switches between construction work when it’s sunny and private investigation when it rains. In Yoav Katz’s “The Tour Guide,” an entrepreneur offers tourists a look at famous crime scenes. And Margalit Bloch supplements her meager income after her husband’s death by selling off the possessions of people who died without heirs in Gai Ad’s “The Expendables.” Most touching are the people just looking to connect, like the grocery clerk who makes dinner for a customer in Deakla Keydar’s “Slow Cooking,” the barista who serves mineral water to the Grim Reaper in Alex Epstein’s “Death in Pajamas,” the hashish peddler who falls in love with a Russian thug’s sister in Antonio Ungar’s “Said the Good,” or the couple whose lives are turned inside out by their finicky dog in co-editor Keret’s “Allergies.”

Editors Keret and Gavron stress not what makes Tel Aviv unique but what it has in common with other cities: its people’s endless, often fruitless struggle to cash in on a losing hand.

While he counts down the days till he marries pathology technician Cleo Morey, the mother of his baby son, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace tangles with a dangerously unbalanced jack-of-all-trades who just won’t let his ex-lover go.

“If I can’t have you, no one will,” thinks George Clooney lookalike Bryce Laurent about Red Westwood, the flame-haired beauty who dumped him when his over-the-top devotion turned abusive and scary. It’s hardly an original concept, but Bryce brings unusual qualifications to the role of the spurned lover–turned–avenger. Though his stories about being an airplane pilot and air traffic controller were piffle, he has expert knowledge of locks (and how to pick them), fires (how to put them out, how to start them) and explosives (guess). He’s a classic narcissist who’s perfectly prepared to warm up for his planned torture killing of Red by attacking those closest to her, beginning with her current boyfriend, widowed family physician Karl Murphy. As Bryce considers whom to strike next—perhaps Red’s best friend, dentist Raquel Evans, or Camilla Westwood, the mother who hired a detective to dig up dirt on Bruce—Grace (Dead Man’s Time, 2013, etc.) faces an adversary closer to home: Sandy Lohmann, his wife, who plans to end her secret life in Munich with their son Bruno by interrupting Grace and Cleo’s wedding with the news that even though she’s been declared legally dead, there’s enough life in her yet to ruin their big day.

Bryce’s ruthless proficiency as an arsonist guarantees the requisite number of pulse-pounding set pieces, but the whole affair feels a bit mechanical, right down to the climactic sequence in which he and Red are locked together inside the panic room she’s installed to keep him at bay.

THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2014

Lippman, Laura—Ed. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (400 pp.) $14.95 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-544-03464-8 The 20 top picks this year span the globe in setting and cross the spectrum in tone.

When you think of criminal malfeasance, you may flash to mean streets and big cities. But crimes sometimes pop up where you least expect them. An overgrown garden |

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NORA BONESTEEL’S CHRISTMAS PAST

outside South Bend, Indiana, hides buried treasure in Jim Allyn’s “Princess Anne.” A rural river holds a deadly secret in Matthew Neill Null’s “Gauley Season.” A virgin Maine timber forest becomes the scene of a careless crime with deadly consequences in Annie Proulx’s “Rough Deeds.” Evil can be all too well-planned, as in Michelle Butler Hallett’s “Bush-Hammer Finish,” set in Newfoundland. But David H. Ingram’s “The Covering Storm” shows that all the planning in the world can’t outpace luck in 19th-century Galveston. The suburbs provide fertile ground for mayhem in Patricia Engel’s “Aida,” Charlaine Harris’ “Small Kingdoms” and Ed Kurtz’s “A Good Marriage.”

Crime also thrives in the wide-open spaces, as in James Lee Burke’s almost pastoral “Going Across Jordan.” It even pokes up in the world’s least populated place, as Laura Van Den Berg demonstrates in “Antarctica.” And in “My Heart Is Either Broken” and “Festered Wounds,” Megan Abbott and Nancy Pauline Simpson show that many crimes take place in the smallest of spaces—the human heart.

Lippman and series editor Penzler set a sumptuous and surprisingly varied table for those who like their thrills short, sweet and creepy.

McCrumb, Sharyn Abingdon Press (192 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-4267-5421-0

McCrumb’s recurring character, Nora Bonesteel, uses her second sight to solve a mystery in this Christmas novella.

A Christmas story loves nostalgia, and a ghost doesn’t hurt either; both appear in this tale of Tennessee mountain charity and goodwill.

Though it’s Christmas Eve, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood and Deputy LeDonne have a warrant for the arrest of J.D. Shull, wanted for crashing into the Mercedes of a senator’s wife. They’re hesitant to go into the back mountains—they don’t want to be stranded in the snowstorm they can see is coming—but LeDonne is a stickler for rules; waiting until after the holidays just won’t do. Meanwhile, Nora is trying to solve the mystery of her new neighbors, the Havertys, Florida transplants now living in the old Honeycutt place. It seems the Havertys’ Christmas tree (a silver foil tree decorated with pink flamingos!) keeps getting knocked over. In between Nora’s reminiscences (in glorious Christmases past, Judge Honeycutt would invite the whole mountain community to his farm), she also remembers when Grandma Flossie warned her not to let people know she had “the sight,” as it’s better to let life proceed as it’s meant to.

As Nora considers how to help the Havertys, the sheriff and LeDonne have reached Shull, who needs a mess of chores done before he can be taken into custody, so his elderly wife and the cows don’t freeze while he’s away. As Nora suspects that the Christmas spirit may be the ghost of Tom Honeycutt, killed in World War II, the sheriff and LeDonne discover they may have just been hoodwinked by a crafty old mountain man.

Though Nora’s fans will want to know what she gets up to at Christmas, the plot and sentiment feel too thin to resonate with newcomers.

MURDER AT MARBLE HOUSE

Maxwell, Alyssa Kensington (336 pp.) $15.00 paper | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-7582-9084-7

A society reporter in 1895 Newport, Rhode Island, tries for a news byline by investigating the death of a medium.

Minutes after rejecting a proposal from handsome, wealthy Derrick Andrews for fear that his great fortune will dampen her drive to pursue a career of her own, Emmaline Cross (Murder at the Breakers, 2014) is summoned to palatial Marble House, where her cousin Consuelo is being kept a virtual prisoner by her mother. Alva Vanderbilt is beside herself because her daughter plans to throw over Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, ninth Duke of Marlborough, to marry Winthrop Rutherfurd, a New York gentleman of relatively modest means. To help persuade her daughter to make a better choice, Alva plans a seance with medium Eleanora Devereaux, to be attended by Alva’s suffragist friends Edwina and Roberta Spooner, Hope Stanford and Lady Amelia Beaumont. But before she can summon a single spirit, Eleanora is strangled with one of Lady Amelia’s scarves, and Consuelo disappears. Clara, a housemaid, is arrested for the murder, but Emma just knows she can’t be guilty, so she appeals to her alternate suitor, Detective Jesse Whyte. Meanwhile, she extracts a promise from her editor at the Newport Observer that if she solves the crime, he’ll make sure the print credit goes to Emma rather than her rival, Ed Billings. With the police stymied, Emma forges ahead on her own—or not quite on her own, since Derrick can’t bear to see her place herself in danger yet again without the help and guidance of a proper gentleman with proper muscles.

Although it packs a heavy dose of romance, Maxwell’s second entry has a creditable mystery, solved by a female detective who’s likable in spite of her formulaic grit and determination.

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UNRAVELED VISIONS

Milton, Nina Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (456 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2014 978-0-7387-4005-8 A shamanic healer has her own fortune read only to find that predictions of the future offer no protection from it.

Sabrina Dare rarely gets her fortune told. As a shamanic healer, she’s usually the one dabbling in the spirit world for her clients. A night out at the Bridgwater Carnival with her friend Debs changes all that when Debs insists that Sabbie get her fortune read by a gypsy girl named Kizzy. The fortune seems to be the standard fare—a man who shouldn’t be trusted, money coming in the future—and Sabbie’s not impressed. But she still gives Kizzy one of |

“Connoisseurs of this eccentric, demanding form will find this an indispensable resource, a pearl beyond price.” from the black lizard big book of locked -room mysteries

THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF LOCKED-ROOM MYSTERIES

her own business cards, possibly to compare notes sometime. The day after the carnival, Sabbie hears the news that a cop’s been shot.

She fears it may be DS Abbott, a man she could almost have wished dead given how annoying he was when Sabbie was involved with DI Reynard Buckley. Though she didn’t really wish him ill, Sabbie dreads hearing that the victim was Abbott, if only because she seems to have accidentally picked up his cellphone when he ran by her the night before. Never mind that; soon Sabbie’s got a bigger mystery to solve. Kizzy’s sister Mirela shows up at Sabbie’s door asking if Sabbie has any idea where Kizzy might be. As usual (In the Moors, 2013), Sabbie becomes overcommitted to helping Mirela while dealing with her own family drama and the mystery she’s sure her new neighbors are involved in.

With so many plotlines, it’s hard to follow Sabbie’s irresponsible yet amusing actions. Readers may wish they’d had more help from Trendle, Sabbie’s otter spirit guide, in showing the way.

Penzler, Otto—Ed. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (956 pp.) $25.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-307-74396-1

Purists be warned: This latest XXXLsized anthology from veteran editor Penzler (The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, 2013, etc.) should really be titled The Black Lizard Big Book of Impossible Crimes.

Not that fans of the most distinctive strain of golden-age plotting will be disappointed, for even if locked rooms appear in only a fraction of these 68 reprints, here is God’s plenty. After they skip the seven endlessly anthologized entries by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jacques Futrelle, Melville Davisson Post and Lord Dunsany, readers will be able to choose among shootings from Agatha Christie to Bill Pronzini, stabbings from R. Austin Freeman to John Lutz, disappearances from E.C. Bentley to H.R.F. Keating, impossible thefts, impossible poisonings, and no fewer than six stories featuring corpses found in the sand or snow with no footprints indicating the presence of a killer. Penzler, who provides introductions to every story, includes one by John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the genre, one by his alter ego Carter Dickson, and three by his most prolific disciple, Edward D. Hoch. Nostalgia buffs will be reunited with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Clayton Rawson and Edmund Crispin, along with ancient debut stories

by Judson Phillips (aka Hugh Pentecost, who’s also represented) and James Yaffe. More adventurous explorers will find that writers as diverse as P.G. Wodehouse, MacKinlay Kantor, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Leslie Charteris, Georges Simenon, William Irish, Fredric Brown, Lawrence Block and Stephen King have all in their time created impossible crimes and solved them neatly. And that’s the biggest limitation of this behemoth collection: Unlike locked-room novels, which can pleasurably tease readers for hundreds of pages before taking them behind the curtain, short stories barely have time to lay out the impossible circumstances before the solution is due. Better not subject yourself to more than one or two of these parlor tricks at a sitting.

However fast or slow they go, however, connoisseurs of this eccentric, demanding form will find this an indispensable resource, a pearl beyond price.

THE MURDER MAN

Parsons, Tony Minotaur (448 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-250-05232-2 978-1-4668-6519-8 e-book Veteran novelist Parsons’ first police thriller introduces Max Wolfe, a detective raising a young child alone, who’s on a quest to find a vicious serial killer.

In 1988, a gang rape and murder committed by a group of public school students—public school is the term for an expensive private school in the U.K.—has repercussions years later when a serial killer starts knocking off the now-grown men who committed the crime. First up is Hugo Buck, a rich banker who likes to beat his wife. Found with a gaping hole from a knife slash across his throat, Buck is only the first of a group of men involved in the crime to be brutally murdered. Wolfe, a detective constable transferred to the homicide squad following his unorthodox defusing of a bomb threat, finds himself trying to balance life with his 5-yearold daughter, Scout, and their puppy, Stan. With his thoughtful new boss, Victor Mallory, Max investigates Buck and the second victim, a homeless former drug addict named Adam. Both the killing wound and the word “PIG” found at the scenes link the crimes, and the information that both men were old friends and part of the same group of student military officers leads Max to become curious about the other students. Max, a pleasant, sympathetic character who takes his job seriously and is tentative about single fatherhood, finds the going slow and real life puzzling. The narrative works best during the first two-thirds of the book, becoming less believable as the novel progresses and Max is hot on the killer’s trail.

The resolution feels both hurried and tacked on to what is otherwise a very readable novel.

ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY LIE

Raphael, Lev Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin Press (190 pp.) $26.95 | $19.95 e-book | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-299-30230-6 978-0-299-30233-7 e-book Professor Nick Hoffman (Hot Rocks, 2007, etc.) learns that even tenure can’t guarantee real security. |

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Fortune has finally smiled at Nick. He’s now a full professor, thanks in no small part to a gift from a former student to Nick’s employer, the State University of Michigan. The bequest, establishing a prestigious speaker’s series, has named Nick the sole administrator of a $25,000 annual grant. While other faculty members are crammed into cubicles, Nick has his own office suite, complete with administrative assistant. He and his partner, SUM’s writer-in-residence Stefan Borowski, along with their West Highland terrier, Marco, live in a splendid center-hall colonial in Michiganapolis, purchased in part with the proceeds from Stefan’s best-selling book about his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. Stefan’s now at work on a second memoir, Fieldwork in the Land of Grief, about the trauma he sustained when a student he’d accused of plagiarism hanged himself outside Stefan’s office. That trauma, however, is small potatoes compared to Stefan and Nick’s current nightmare. First, their home is invaded by a SWAT team in armed personnel carriers, acting on a vague tip that the pair may be holding someone hostage. Stefan is arrested, strip-searched and jailed. Their boss, Dean Bullerschmidt, threatens to fire them for creating bad publicity. Someone smashes their laptop and leaves road kill on their bed. Their neighbor, whip-smart defense attorney Vanessa Liberati, a New York transplant, offers her help. But their true salvation comes from Stefan’s mentor, Father Ryan Burke, who provides a solution that would gladden the heart of any NRA member.

What looks at first like a sensitive exploration into competing values ends as an exercise in might-is-right. Raphael, co-author of Stick Up for Yourself: Every Kid’s Guide to Personal Power & Positive Self-Esteem (1999), should know better.

leaves Rosemary and takes up with Daphne, causing unfathomable hurt and confusion for his wife of 50 years, his daughter and his granddaughters. Winwood’s son Michael, suddenly bereaved of Zoe Nicholson, the aunt who brought him up, feels a responsibility to reconnect with Clara Moss, his family’s old cleaner, and his unloving father, who incredibly is still alive at 99 in the Urban Grange rest home. Complications will follow, but they’re not at all the ones you’d expect.

The sedate pace and sociological focus of Rendell’s recent work (No Man’s Nightingale, 2013, etc.) are quickened here by the capacity of her golden agers to act, and act out, in ways as surprising as they are logical.

THE PIERCED HEART

Shepherd, Lynn Delacorte (256 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-345-54543-5 978-0-345-54544-2 e-book Literary sleuth Charles Maddox takes on Dracula.

Charles has been hired by Oxford’s Bodleian Library to vet the Baron Von Reisenberg, who’s offered the curators a princely sum for the upkeep of one of the library’s finest collections. The job seems like a sinecure, but at Castle Reisenberg, the baron’s remote Austrian home, Charles discovers that his host, a noted inventor, is involved in some very dodgy research.

His curiosity soon gets him into trouble with the baron, who sets a dog on him and has him carried off to an insane asylum.

Only an earlier chance meeting with a local doctor clears the way for his return to England, where his friend Sgt. Wheeler asks for his help with the case of a series of murdered prostitutes whose heads and hearts have been removed. The small holes Charles notices in their necks remind him all too vividly of his trip to Austria, where fear of vampires is widespread among the peasants. Meanwhile, in Whitby, the showman Professor de Caus has returned from abroad with his daughter Lucy, who he fears has gone mad after helping him with a smoke-and-mirrors show that claims to raise the dead. Lucy’s unexplainable powers have attracted the attention of the baron, who secretly removes her to London, which is crowded with foreigners visiting the Great Exhibition of 1851, a year when science is battling superstition.

The police try to keep the murders secret, but when a reporter breaks the story, near riots ensue. Though Maddox is convinced that the baron is the culprit, proving it and finding Lucy prove to be the most difficult tasks of his career.

Another tour de force with a striking finale from Shepherd (A Fatal Likeness, 2013, etc.), who specializes in turning iconic novels into clever, complicated mysteries for her tormented hero to solve. (Agent: Ben Mason)

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

Rendell, Ruth Scribner (288 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4767-8432-8

Rendell’s 65th novel shows the incalculable effects of a 70-year-old crime on a group of friends—schoolchildren when it happened, alarmingly unpredictable retirees now.

One evening in 1944, John Winwood caught his wife, Anita, holding hands with another man. Taking the first opportunity to entice the lovers into his conjugal bed by pretending to take a trip, he strangled them both, then disposed of their bodies, but not before cutting off the offending hands, depositing them in a biscuit tin and burying it in a neighborhood tunnel. Two generations later, a construction project suddenly brings the biscuit tin to light, and the children who used to play in the tunnels—or the qanats, as the Winwoods’ 12-yearold next-door neighbor, Daphne Jones, called them—soon connect the ghoulish find with the time when Winwood chased them all out of the qanats. Alan Norris and his wife, Rosemary, resolve to visit their old friend George Batchelor, whose wife, Maureen, writes to DI Colin Quell. While Quell awaits the results of tests on the ancient discovery, Alan unaccountably 38

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manager Edward Bell is compassionate, if somewhat oversold on loyalty to his employers. But the limitations of her position prey on Monika. She’s forbidden by the earl to meet with the folks he’s handpicked to handle security for the festival— a motorcycle gang called the Devil’s Disciples—because they don’t like police. And Baxter insists she stay at Stamford Hall 24/7 for the duration of the festival. While she’s stuck at the manor house, there’s a juicy murder to investigate back in Whitebridge. The body of unemployed tabloid journalist Terry Lewis turns up in an alley. Monika’s team is temporarily assigned to the grotesquely misnamed DCI Wellbeloved, who immediately tries to divide and conquer. He suggests to DI Colin Beresford that DC Jack Crane will soon snatch his job and tells DS Kate Meadows that she has the spark Beresford lacks. Naturally, they want Monika back ASAP. But will a solution to Lewis’ murder while Monika languishes behind the gates of Stamford Hall help their old boss, or will it just cement Wellbeloved’s position as their new leader?

It’s high time for Baxter to patch things up with Paniatowski, before their continuing feud overshadows Spencer’s deft plotting.

Smallman, Phyllis TouchWood Editions (264 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 23, 2014 978-1-77151-090-5 Trying to keep mum after she’s witnessed a crime does nothing to keep bar owner Sherri Travis out of trouble.

After Sherri is carjacked and roughed up on her way back to Jacaranda from Miami, she expects to come home to a little sympathy from Clay Adams, her fiance. But Clay seems to agree more with what her father told her when she first crossed the Everglades: “Don’t stop for anything.” Though Sherri may have learned her lesson about stopping—a brief refueling led to the carjacking, a chase and her discovery of a man’s body— she refuses to take Clay’s advice when he tells her she needs to report what she’s seen to the authorities. Sherri thinks she can pretend it was all a sort of nightmare and go back to work at the Sunset, since owning and managing the bar is trouble enough. Then she finds out that the dead man was Ben Bricklin, owner of the Osceola Nursery, whose brother Ethan is one of the richest men in Florida. Ethan’s appearance at the Sunset and his insistence on getting to know Sherri and Clay set off warning signs for Sherri. She’s known her fair share of trouble (Highball Exit, 2012, etc.), and she knows men like Ethan don’t poke around looking for answers without good reason. Is it possible he knows she was on the scene the night Ben was killed?

Despite her suspicions, Ethan endears himself to Sherri, and she soon helps him search for his brother’s killer.

If you think the world that Sherri gets mixed up in doesn’t seem very closely related to the rest of her life, you’ll find big developments in this story that are bound to have lasting repercussions for this series—though they happen so quickly that readers may be left in shock.

TRAPLINE

Stevens, Mark Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (408 pp.) $14.99 paper | Nov. 8, 2014 978-0-7387-4164-2 Colorado’s stunningly beautiful Flat Tops Wilderness hides some nasty secrets.

When hunting guide Allison Coil and her boyfriend, Colin, arrive at their meeting with local businessman William Sulchuk, his teenage daughter and a few other friends at Lumberjack Camp, they learn that the group has discovered a badly mauled body. Although the corpse looks like the victim of a mountain lion attack, Allison has a bad feeling it may be something more sinister. After the remains are taken away for forensic examination, Allison scouts the area and comes upon a camp inhabited by surly men and surrounded by dog tracks. Down in the town of Glenwood Springs, local reporter Duncan Bloom is watching politician Tom Lamott give a speech when he runs into Allison’s friend Trudy Heath, whose organic food business, Down to Earth, he recently profiled. Focusing on developing a better relationship with Mexico, Lamott gives part of his speech in fluent Spanish. He pleases some of the crowd but not the local residents up in arms about the influx of Latinos, some illegal, they feel are taking jobs away from them and burdening local schools and social services.

After Lamott is shot and critically wounded, the area is quickly overrun by the national media. One of Trudy’s Latino workers, snatched by unknown men, escapes, leaving Trudy to wonder what happened to him and combine forces with Duncan, who senses another good story. Allison, Colin, Duncan and Trudy end up uncovering a deep-rooted conspiracy that puts them all in danger.

SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL

Spencer, Sally Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8408-4

Chief Constable George Baxter continues to harass DCI Monika Paniatowski.

Since the death of his wife in an alcohol-fueled car crash, Baxter has been out to undermine Monika (Death’s Dark Shadow, 2014, etc.). Now he’s stuck his former lover with an assignment no self-respecting detective would tolerate: acting as adviser to the estate manager of Stamford Hall, where Gervaise de Courtney, 13th Earl of Ridley, plans to host a rock music festival. The assignment has some rewards. Katerina, Countess of Ridley, a Central European refugee who was rescued by her husband from the horrors of the 1968 Prague Spring, is a kindred spirit. And estate |

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Allison’s third adventure (Buried by the Roan, 2011, etc.) combines a loving portrait of a beautiful area with an ugly, all-too-believable conspiracy that could have been ripped from today’s headlines.

A handful of crime-related newspaper articles establishes a creepy pulse for the story that follows. Plump “supercook” Aunty Lee bustles to prepare for a big catering job with her maid, Nina, and her new partner, Cherril, who plans to take over and expand Aunty Lee’s wine sideline if her stuffy husband, Mycroft, permits it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere at Sung Law, whose celebration Aunty Lee is catering, is far from festive. CEO Mabel Sung requires her daughter, Sharon, who’s just made partner, to address her as Mrs. Sung, not “Mum.” Mabel dotes on her son, Leonard, who’s mentally impaired after years of drug abuse. It’s Henry, the father of the two, who offers the most hands-on help to Aunty Lee. A controversial menu item is the chicken stew buah keluak, made with seeds that are poisonous if improperly prepared. When Mabel and Lennie are late coming downstairs, tongues wag, and ambitious secretary GraceFaith goes to check on them. She finds them both dead, shells from the buah keluak all over the floor. Was their last meal an act of compassion by the controlling Mabel, or were they murdered by Aunty Lee’s spicy, dicey dish? Curiosity would prompt Aunty Lee to probe anyway, but the threat to her livelihood makes her sleuthing a necessity, even if she ruffles the feathers of courtly Inspector Salim Mawar.

This delicious sophomore entry in Yu’s sassy series (Aunty Lee’s Delights, 2013) has the quaint accessibility, colorful characters and quotidian detail of a traditional cozy but also a slyly bracing edge.

MURDER AT THE BRIGHTWELL

Weaver, Ashley Minotaur (336 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-250-04636-9 978-1-4668-4653-1 e-book

A lovely seaside hotel is the backdrop for murder.

England, 1932. Young, beautiful and wealthy, Amory Ames has a dashingly handsome, equally wealthy husband and an unhappy marriage. Milo Ames is seldom home, and when he is, their relationship is, to put it politely, strained. So when Amory’s former fiance, Gilmore Trent, begs her to go to the Brightwell Hotel with him to help break up his sister Emmeline’s romance with Rupert Howe, she agrees, even though her joining Gil may create a scandal. Upon their arrival, Amory and Gil run into Yvonne Roland, a society gossip who jumps to the conclusion that they’re a couple. There’s quite a mixed group vacationing at the Brightwell, but when Howe is found dead at the base of a cliff, it’s Gil who’s suspected of killing him. Amory, still in love with Milo, feels guilty about dumping Gil. She’s quite fond of him and determined to prove him innocent despite warnings from DI Jones that her sleuthing could prove dangerous. When Milo arrives on the scene, their brittle conversations don’t tell Amory whether he’s motivated by jealousy or just looking for excitement.

Snooping in the room of the bullying Nelson Hamilton, the pair is forced to hide in a wardrobe when he suddenly returns to take a bath. Attempting to sneak away, they find him dead in the bathtub. Despite her unhappiness and confusion in her relationships, Amory is still determined to save Gil, even if her snooping puts her on the killer’s to-do list.

A spunky heroine, a tense romance and red herrings galore make Weaver’s debut a pleasant read for nostalgia buffs who miss Agatha Christie.

science fiction and fantasy THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER

Cato, Beth Harper Voyager (368 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Sep. 16, 2014 978-0-06-231384-3 978-0-06-231385-0 e-book

AUNTY LEE’S DEADLY SPECIALS

In a debut that promises to be the first of two novels set in this world, Cato introduces a likable heroine and a serviceably imagined steampunk fantasy painted with broad strokes of magic and political intrigue.

Octavia Leander is a young healer, a “medician,” whose magical ability to heal is extraordinary even in a world flush with airships, chimeras, and the expected steampunk trappings of clockwork science and unusual magic systems. Her journey to a new life as the resident healer of a small country town takes her onto the airship Argus, where unlikely plots and assassination attempts pull her deep into the troubles of a country suffering from the effects of war. The companions she

Yu, Ovidia Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-06-233832-7 978-0-06-233833-4 e-book A possible poisoning on the job doesn’t just pique Aunty Lee’s interest, but becomes a matter of professional life and death.

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collects in her travels are, unsurprisingly, not what they seem, and Cato employs many conventions of fantasy adventure to set the story in motion: a kidnapped princess, elite spies, a patchwork religion and an enthusiastic embrace of simple romance.

The characters Octavia meets are appealing in an exaggerated way; the plot is often graceless but has the undeniable ability to encourage the dogged turning of pages. While the narration is sometimes tripped up by awkward shifts into Octavia’s interior monologue and swathes of absurd description—like the comparison of a woman’s bosom to “planets of flesh that hovered above an unblemished satin sky”—it gains a prickly insistence from a depiction of magic that depends on sacrifice as well as power. The magic in this world does not always arrive without a price, and that gives it a depth that would otherwise be missing.

A light read that suffers from heavy-handed prose but may offer an interesting new world to readers who enjoy the flavor of steampunk fantasy and soap-opera intrigue.

OF BONE AND THUNDER

Evans, Chris Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (496 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-4516-7931-1

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EXO

Gould, Steven Tor (464 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-7653-3654-5 978-1-4668-2848-3 e-book Gould literally raises the bar on teleportation in this sequel to Impulse (2013).

Seventeen-year-old Cent is your typical teen: She’s reeling from a breakup with her boyfriend, worried about her ailing grandmother and developing a plan to teleport into orbit— you know, the usual. Intelligent, resourceful and well-funded, Kirkus Quart page ad_Layout 1 9/9/2014 4:10 PM Page 1

New military fantasy—imagine the Vietnam War fought with medieval weaponry, magic and dragons—from the military historian and author of the Iron Elves trilogy (Ashes of a Black Frost, 2011, etc.).

Evans’ scenario is vividly portrayed and, for the most part, well worked out. Despite turmoil and political uncertainty at home, the Kingdom intends to pacify the jungle-covered continent of Luitox. Opposing the Kingdom’s occupation, the Forest Collective operates from concealed positions deep in the jungle, has powerful magic, and its fighters, or “slyts,” are far more numerous than the Kingdom’s leaders will admit. The soldiers of Red Shield—Carny, Big Hog, Listowk, the Wraith and many others—face not only the Collective, but also searing heat, suffocating humidity, the seductions of drugs or religion, superiors who care only about body counts, an enemy that refuses to stand and fight, and a lack of clear objectives, yet remain determined to do their jobs, and we come to care deeply about their fates as they struggle through a series of confusing and unpleasant engagements. Formerly slaves, dwarves may serve in support roles but not in actual combat, and they represent the racial element in the mix. Instead of helicopters, the Kingdom has dragons, or “rags.” Rag driver Vorly Astol, his rag, Carduus, and a RAT, or Royal Academy of Thaumology, Breeze—one of the few women serving—have been chosen to help field-test a new communications and navigation system based on thaumic crystals. Jawn Rathim, a naïve junior officer and powerful RAT, proves surprisingly useful despite his lack of familiarity with the system. And then there’s mysterious “crowny,” Crown Service, officer “Rickets” Ketts, who may well be a secret agent. It all adds up to an ugly and utterly compelling narrative, the one |

possible drawback being uncertainty about how magic works and what its organizing principles are.

Memorable and deeply satisfying—a fitting tribute to those who serve.

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“The—‘Dune’ of Steampunk Novels” John Gray, Creator of TV’s ‘Ghost Whisperer’ 5

“A Steampunk Fever Dream . . .

Will Enrapture History Fans and Sci-Fi Buffs . . .”

— Kirkus Reviews

- FOR FILM OR PUBLICATION RIGHTS CONTACT BEN BOVA AT THE BOVA LITERARY AGENCY BenBova@1901robotfighter.com science fiction & fantasy

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she begins field-testing a new spacesuit and putting together a company that will both support her voyages and make a profit by placing small satellites into orbit and removing debris. It’s not long before Cent’s one-woman space program gains considerable attention, including some from the shadowy corporation that once captured Cent’s father, Davy, and still pursues their family. Gould grows more ambitious with every book in the Jumper series. He began by mixing speculative fiction, adventure and bildungsroman, then added in political and corporate thriller; this novel is primarily hard sci-fi while maintaining the other genres. By constantly experimenting with new tropes and extending the limits of the Harrison-Rice family’s power to teleport, Gould ensures that each installment remains fresh and enthralling. As in the previous book, Cent’s genius and her social skills (considering that she’s been discouraged from creating close bonds with anyone outside her immediate family) seem almost more unusual than her teleporting ability, but her character has an intellectual and emotional validity as well as an inherent likability that encourages the reader to overlook those quibbles.

There’s simply no knowing where Cent and this series are headed next...but it’ll sure be interesting to find out.

to explode out of nowhere rather than unfolding organically, and eventually they stop packing an emotional punch. Even though the book would benefit from another hundred pages, more is at stake than an entertaining read. The political turmoil created by Kress’ aliens is a warning for the reader to pay more attention to how modern-day conflicts are handled.

Science-fiction fans will luxuriate in the dystopian madness, while even nonfans will find an artful critique of humanity’s ability to cooperate in the face of a greater threat.

THE DARK DEFILES

Morgan, Richard K. Del Rey/Ballantine (656 pp.) $18.00 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-345-49310-1 Final installment of Morgan’s bleak fantasy/far-future science-fiction trilogy (The Cold Commands, 2011, etc.).

Homosexuality is anathema in the world where swordsman Ringil Eskiath, a weary, gay, middle-aged war hero, lives and fights. With his friends Archeth, last of the immortal Kiriath race, and Egar the Dragonbane, he sets off to find the Illwrack Changeling, supposedly the evil-sorcerer scion of a powerful race, the dwenda or Aldrain, that once ruled the world. However, the instructions given by Anasharal the Helmsman, a grouchy and supercilious Kiriath robot, are irritatingly imprecise. If the rumors about the Changeling and the return of the dwenda are correct, Ringil will need to develop his understanding and control of the ikinri ‘ska, a demonic magic powered by otherworldly glyphs. Even worse, the dwenda possess an irresistible weapon, the Talons of the Sun—though nobody knows what it might consist of. He soon becomes separated from Archeth and Egan, who locate a Warhelm, an ancient Kiriath combat installation that seems to have had much of its programming and capabilities purposefully damaged—by Archeth’s father. This time, Morgan’s ultraviolent narrative, while still crackling with intensity and expletives, bloats up into doorstopper territory, with a corresponding loss of focus. Still, for the most part the prose remains atmospheric and highly textured, complete with subtexts and sexual interludes. Add on a conclusion that contrives to be both enigmatic and less than fully satisfying, and maybe doesn’t even add up— yet such is the quality of Morgan’s vision, and few readers will feel short-changed or disappointed.

So, the flab and the contrivances are minor flaws in a finale that displays all the purposefully hard edges and grim magnificence that made the first two volumes stand out.

YESTERDAY’S KIN

Kress, Nancy Tachyon (192 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-61696-175-6

In a dystopian future, aliens have parked their spaceship in New York Harbor, America is rabidly isolationist, and geneticist Marianne Jenner’s three adult children can’t stop squabbling.

In the middle of receiving accolades for her work discovering that all humans are descended from a common female ancestor, Marianne is yanked away by the government. She’s one of a handful of scientists who have been issued a special invitation to venture inside the alien spaceship. While turmoil rages around the globe about how to deal with the aliens, inside the spaceship, the visitors bring news of a far greater threat to human existence. Their intentions are unclear, but one thing is certain: They have a disturbing interest in Marianne’s work. Kress (After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, 2012, etc.) spins an eminently readable tale revolving around Marianne and her children: Elizabeth, the suspicious border patrol agent; Ryan, the charming botanist who studies invasive species; and Noah, the lovable drug addict who can’t figure out who he is. Each of them has a very different idea about what it will take to save humanity, but while the family and the rest of the world are embroiled in arguments, the clock keeps ticking. Kress keeps her science understandable and her plot complex, rounding everything out with a healthy dose of practical philosophy delivered in clear, precise language.

While the story zooms along at breakneck speed, Kress skimps on character development and buildup. As a result, events seem 42

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needs a date for a wedding in sunny California, Jack jumps in.

Emmaline is the most down-to-earth person he knows, and helping her save face with an ex seems like a fair trade-off for some warm weather and a respite from his town’s suffocating admiration. For Emmaline, Jack is the last man in the world she wants to take since she has a huge crush on him but knows he’s way out of her league.

“Jack Holland was ridiculously gorgeous....Tall and blond with eyes that were so clear and perfect and pure that they made a person think of all sorts of ridiculous synonyms for blue.” However, with no one else on the horizon, she agrees, then falls for him even more when he poses as her lover and defends her to the awful ex and his bridezilla, not to mention the oblivious psychologist parents who are convinced she’s gay. Sleeping together only complicates things, and back home, they fumble their relationship. Jack’s exquisite ex-wife is determined to get back together with him, while he’s suffering from a case of PTSD he refuses to acknowledge. While Emmaline knows Jack is attracted to her, he never shows any signs of fighting for her when it matters. Wounded and unsure, Jack and Emmaline examine their hearts and decide to fight for their unexpected yet perfect-for-each-other happy ending. Higgins returns to her popular Blue Heron series, creating two appealing, authentic characters who take a staggering emotional journey cushioned by humor and love.

Higgins exhibits her storytelling artistry with another stunning romance that includes her trademark touches of laugh-out-loud humor and tear-jerking pathos.

ONLY ENCHANTING

Balogh, Mary Signet (400 pp.) $7.99 paper | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-451-46966-3 A widow clinging to a safe, dull life falls in love with a former soldier recovering from a head injury in this entertaining novel.

Balogh builds on her many past successes with the fourth book in her Survivors’ Club series, which features six men and one woman who have all been irreparably damaged during the Napoleonic wars. Agnes Keeping’s life was changed forever when her mother ran off with a lover when Agnes was 5. As a result, Agnes grew up thinking of romantic passion as her biggest enemy, one that might steal her reason and cause her to hurt the people she most cares about. So she was quick to embrace an unexciting marriage with William Keeping, “a neighboring gentleman of sober address.” When he dies, Agnes moves to the village of Inglebrook, where her spinster sister, Dora, teaches music. There, Agnes befriends the new Viscountess Darleigh, whose husband is a member of the Survivors’ Club. At their home, Agnes meets Flavian Arnott, Viscount Ponsonby, a golden god of a man whose stammer is the only outward sign of the trauma and tragedy he experienced during the war. For Agnes, falling in love with Flavian is a risk to her tranquil life of painting watercolors and taking tea with the viscountess. For Flavian, Agnes represents a safe harbor from the manipulations of his family. Their precipitous marriage is a shock to Flavian’s mother and sister, who want him to marry Velma, the widowed Countess of Hazeltine. Velma was once betrothed to Flavian, but she abandoned him for his best friend when he returned home injured from the war. Fortunately, Agnes refuses to be cowed by the self-important Arnott family.

Although it lacks pizzazz, Balogh’s latest effort is a comfortably entertaining read.

IF HE’S DARING

Howell, Hannah Zebra/Kensington (352 pp.) $7.99 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-4201-3499-5 A 5-year-old boy becomes a pawn in an adults’ game when he’s kidnapped by his uncle as his mother gives chase in late-18th-century England.

In the latest installment of Howell’s Wherlockes series, Lady Catryn Gryffin de Warrenne is a lovely widow with a painfully ordinary personality. When her dead husband’s brother, Sir Morris de Warrenne, kidnaps her son, Alwyn, Catryn hies off after him, injuring her horse within the first half hour. Fortunately for her, the carriage she steals to continue her pursuit belongs to Sir Orion Wherlocke, just the man to help her find her son: “His family and his colleagues in the government did not call him The Bloodhound as a jest.” Even better, Orion’s newly discovered 8-year-old son, a former street urchin named Giles, is inside the carriage when Catryn steals it. The Wherlocke clan is known for their supernatural abilities, and as Orion joins Catryn in pursuing Morris across the countryside, it becomes clear that Catryn and Alwyn also have some unusual talents and physical traits that indicate they may have ties to the Wherlocke family. Alwyn’s abilities appear, at first, to be a child’s game, a habit of talking to made-up people. But it soon becomes clear that he’s really able to talk to ghosts. Giles

IN YOUR DREAMS

Higgins, Kristan Harlequin (480 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-373-77931-4 When Emmaline Neal needs a date for her ex-fiance’s wedding, Jack Holland volunteers, eager to escape to Malibu from freezing Manningsport, New York, and the community that’s branded him a hero.

After rescuing four local teens from a car accident, Jack feels stifled by his sudden celebrity, especially since he feels unworthy. Hearing that friendly local cop Emmaline |

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appoints himself Alwyn’s protector, even when the newly rescued child is deposited at a Wherlocke family estate while his mother and her champion continue to hunt for Morris. While Orion struggles with his commitment to bachelorhood, Catryn struggles to understand her new insights about the hellish first marriage that produced her son.

The Wherlockes’ supernatural gifts complement each other and strengthen the story, making for believable and interesting plot twists in spite of the heroine’s insipid personality.

O’Keefe, Molly Bantam (368 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-345-54905-1

After an uncharacteristic one-night stand, congressional candidate Harrison Montgomery is facing scandal when Ryan Kaminski winds up pregnant; marrying her is the obvious solution, but falling in love is an unexpected surprise.

After facing a family crisis, Harrison gives into temptation and connects with Ryan, the beautiful, compassionate bartender with blue-collar roots and a slightly shady past he meets in his hotel. After a sizzling one-night stand, he leaves her a sweet note that nonetheless expresses his intention to never see her again, then feels betrayed when he learns she’s pregnant and claims the baby is his. Desperate to salvage his reputation, he convinces her to marry him, but while the two maintain a very cozy and romantic public image, privately they are too clouded by distrust and uncertainty to forge an authentic relationship, especially since Harrison’s parents and sister are struggling to navigate their own personal and public personae. Ryan wants to learn more about the “real” Harrison she met in a Manhattan hotel room but is stymied by the cool, remote man he’s become since their quick wedding. Set against the backdrop of Southern politics, the book is a modern rendition of the classic “marriage of convenience” romance trope, and in O’Keefe’s very capable hands, readers are drawn into Ryan and Harrison’s engaging journey to understanding and love. With two generations of Montgomery family scandal and drama to sift through, Harrison’s parents, especially, seem to shift from supporters to saboteurs and back again, while Ryan, especially, is an intriguing character who surprises everyone, including herself, by becoming an asset rather than a liability. Overall a great read, though there are perhaps too many moments when Ryan and Harrison seem on the brink of emotional breakthrough, only to retreat into yet another moment of uncertainty. O’Keefe, however, is a master of explaining—and selling—character motivations.

A touching, sexy and surprising story of two people from completely different worlds who turn out to be a perfect match. (Agent: Pam Hopkins)

WHEN WE MET

Jackson, A.L.; McAdams, Molly; King, Tiffany; Lee, Christina New American Library (352 pp.) $14.00 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-451-47192-5 Four female college juniors share a house—and newly dramatic love lives— in this new-adult romance written by four separate authors in four distinct sections that focus on each woman’s love story.

Misha, Indy, Courtney and Chloe are very different (but all breathtakingly gorgeous) young women living under one Michigan roof as they prepare for what they hope will be their very best year at college. They each have demons they’re trying to transcend. Misha recently endured the humiliation of her neighbor crush-next-door leaking her sex tape; Indy is using reckless drinking, partying and hookups to help forget her longtime boyfriend’s devastating infidelity; Courtney feels less than trustful toward men, particularly the jocks who frequent the sports bar where she waitresses; and Chloe craves escape from a tightly controlled life under her mother’s nagging thumb. The women’s individual struggles are just background noise for the crucial inner heartbeat of the book, however. That heartbeat, naturally, would be...boys. Specifically, four “[b]eautiful...commanding” college boys, Darryn, Kier, Dalton and Blake, all single, manly and preoccupied with “saving” the perfectly capable college women they fall for. The book’s four sections are told from the points of view of both members of each couple (for example: Part 1, “Behind Her Eyes,” is recounted in alternating chapters by Misha and Darryn), and the “male” chapters sometimes feel laughable in their attempts at casual bro-speak.

Though the book’s four-protagonist, four-author concept keeps the book feeling fresh, each section suffers from repetitive word choices (if we never read the term “deepen the kiss” again, it will be too soon) and sometimes-rote plotlines that lean too heavily on gender stereotypes.

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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Amram, Megan Scribner (224 pp.) $25.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4767-5788-9

JERRY LEE LEWIS by Rick Bragg...................................................... 48 THE QUANTUM MOMENT by Robert P. Crease; Alfred Scharff Goldhaber.....................................................................52 PUTIN’S KLEPTOCRACY by Karen Dawisha....................................54 CITIZEN COKE by Bartow J. Elmore..................................................56 STALIN by Stephen Kotkin...................................................................70 PRESIDENTS AND THEIR GENERALS by Matthew Moten............. 75 NATIONAL INSECURITY by David Rothkopf................................... 80 NO MAN’S LAND by Elizabeth D. Samet.......................................... 82 THE THIRTEENTH TURN by Jack Shuler........................................... 82 ON HIS OWN TERMS by Richard Norton Smith...............................83 THE DELUGE by Adam Tooze.............................................................. 88 ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE by Gaia Vince................ 88 STALIN Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

Kotkin, Stephen Penguin Press (960 pp.) $40.00 Nov. 10, 2014 978-1-59420-379-4

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This parody of a science textbook for women, recast in Cosmo style, has a funny concept and cover, but the text itself is so padded that more will skim it than read it.

Parks and Recreation writer Amram satirizes the idea that women are incapable of understanding science by dumbing it down, drenching it in sex and lightening the textual load with a lot of graphics. The author describes herself (often) as “a fun, flirty young woman” who remains obsessed with her ex-boyfriend and details how she has wreaked her revenge on him, sexual and otherwise. “Science is hard for most people, let alone women,” writes the author. “It has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout history: female brains aren’t biologically constructed to understand scientific concepts, and tiny female hands aren’t constructed to turn most textbooks’ large, heavy covers.” In addition to the features blurbed on the cover—“Tips for Hosting Your Own Big Bang,” “Hot Reproductive Sex Tips,” “Orgasms vs. Organisms”—it offers the “fun, flirty” quiz to discover “Do You Have Cancer?” and “The Period! Ick! Table.” The author strays far from anything even tangentially related to science—e.g., “America: A Review,” as if the country were a long-running TV series (“My rating: 50 stars out of a hundred”), and the objectivist advice column, “Dear Ayn Randers.” Amram may have plenty of ideas for funny bits, but the follow-through often falls short of the inspiration—and the opening 10-page “Dedication” practically dares readers to make it word for word through the end. Later, she explains, “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m just trying to use as many words as I, Megan Amram, possibly know so that I, Megan Amram, the author of this book, can kill (i.e., murder, assassinate) as many trees as possible.”

Despite some laughs, this book will try the patience of even its targeted readership.

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looking back on 10 years at kirkus When I first started at Kirkus as an editorial assistant in September 2004, we still sent our pre-publication review notifications to publishers via fax machine. Fax! We also managed our content with a laughably out-of-date Filemaker system and dial-up–era website. Of course, during those years, we were owned

by Nielsen Media, and little did we know that in 2009, they would decide to shutter the decades-old publication—and put me and my colleagues out of a job.

Thankfully, by early 2010, Kirkus had been purchased by a group including my current bosses, Herb Simon and Marc Winkelman, and we have been steadily growing ever since. Not only have we nearly doubled the number of books we review each year (nearly 8,000) and added a robust features section that includes author interviews, blogs, essays and other non- The way things were review content, but we have significantly expanded our business to include a wide variety of new products and services: Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Editorial, Kirkus Pro Connect, Kirkus TV and most recently, the Kirkus Prize, one of the richest literary awards in the world (and one of my favorite new projects). We’re not just for librarians anymore, folks.

In addition to branching out beyond the pre-publication reviews box, we drastically overhauled both our website and our print publication, making it easier and more enjoyable than ever to learn about the next bestseller or literary classic—which has been our focus at Kirkus for more than 80 years.

In thinking about the last 10 years and how the publishing industry has changed—and survived, despite all the doom-and-gloom prognostication—I’m proud that Kirkus has remained consistent in its goal to provide honest assessments of books and continue to offer readers a simple tool for discovering their next favorite book or author. —E.L.

GIL SCOTT-HERON Pieces of a Man

Baram, Marcus St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-250-01278-4

The first full-length biography of the legendary poet/musician famous for his socially conscious lyrics.

A revered figure of both hip-hop and the counterculture, Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) was an artist who defied easy classification. Born in Chicago but raised predominately in the small town of Jackson, Tennessee, Scott-Heron experienced firsthand the hypocrisy of segregation and the blues’ “pathos and gut-wrenching emotional honesty,” which would provide him with a rhythm to which to set his evocative lyrics. International Business Times managing editor Baram, who knew his subject during his life, claims that Scott-Heron’s unique style “would emphasize certain words on certain beats, anticipating by a decade the revolution of hip-hop.” Though indebted to blues, his two major influences were Langston Hughes and John Coltrane. Scott-Heron had always considered himself a writer who used music as a way to perform his poetry, and it was Coltrane’s vision and drive that inspired Scott-Heron to focus on his writing. While at Lincoln University, Scott-Heron transformed from a somewhat reserved though passionate observer to an outspoken advocate of social justice. His music reflected this change in the narratives he sang of ghetto life, such as “The Bottle,” as well his bitter critique of American culture and power, “Winter in America.” The polemical “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” would define his career, though Scott-Heron often harangued its misinterpretation, despite licensing the song to Nike. Scott-Heron sought to raise awareness of and legitimize the black experience in America, only to witness the malaise and apathy of the late 1970s erode the progressive spirit that inspired him. He continued to record, but without longtime friend and collaborator Brian Jackson, his sales and critical reception waned. Retreating into a severe cocaine addiction, resulting in several arrests and jail sentences, Scott-Heron made a final recording in 2010 before dying in 2011.

Controversial and enigmatic, the tragic trajectory of Scott-Heron’s life and career is expertly examined in this testament to one of the last great radical artists.

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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THE PORNOGRAPHER’S DAUGHTER A Memoir of Childhood, My Dad, and Deep Throat Battista-Frazee, Kristin Skyhorse Publishing (256 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 2, 2014 978-1-62914-434-4

A plodding memoir of life in 1970s smutland.

What do you do when your father decides to ditch a successful career in investment banking to go into the pornography business, cutting his teeth on the likes of Linda Lovelace? Well, if you’re a kid, you go out and play in the street, eat saltwater taffy at the beach, commune with family and only much later learn about the sordidness of the whole business, courtesy of a helpfully judgmental elder. BattistaFrazee’s father emerges from these pages as a fellow who, like so many of us, is always game to chase after the ever elusive dollar, his ethical sense always situationally located; he also comes off as a bit foolish when it came to his business, wondering why he lost his license in Philadelphia over an obscenity charge in Tennessee, puzzled about why he should have to obtain a liquor license in order to sell booze at the strip club into which he diversified. What’s clear from the outset is that he wasn’t a First Amendment champion in the way of Larry Flynt or someone with a desire to shock the bourgeoisie along the lines of Al Goldstein, but instead an unimaginative fellow out to make money. His daughter’s account is similarly unimaginative: If the pornographer in question comes off as a touch hapless, the mother as the definition of long-suffering and the players a collection of Italian-American stereotypes—“I sat at the table complaining about how I didn’t want to eat. (I was an Italian mother’s worst nightmare”)—then the memoirist herself reads as merely ordinary.

Barely serviceable. Readers will learn a bit about the porn business of the pre-Internet age, but they might as well be reading about farm equipment or lumber.

aware of the information we obtain through sight, Beckerman bolsters his conclusion that it is sound rather than sight that is our most important sense, citing how The Star Spangled Banner and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony evoke powerful emotions by the use of a few repeated notes. We instantly recognize these musical phrases, or “sound logos,” which “efficiently let listeners recall and understand rich stories.” The author describes this as the use of sound to create “boom moments” that “spark memories...and, most important, elicit feelings.” For example, when creating their Bullitt Mustang, Ford Motors attempted to mimic the sound of fictional detective Frank Bullitt’s 440 Magnum V-8-powered Dodge Charger. To support his case, Beckerman reviews the trajectory of his own career, beginning in the 1990s when he produced demos for songwriters by day and worked as night manager for a company creating spot advertising for radio. For example, he relates how Man Made Music created the sonic logo for AT&T. Fifteen writers worked more than 500 hours to create a theme, which was summarily turned down by the AT&T executives because it sounded “too happy.” Several weeks later, they came up with a new concept that evoked

THE SONIC BOOM How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy

Beckerman, Joel with Gray, Tyler Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (272 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-544-19174-7

Man Made Music founder Beckerman, with the assistance of Gray (The Hit Charade: Lou Pearlman, Boy Bands, and the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History, 2008), explains the use of sonic branding in advertising.

The author makes a strong case that we are unaware of the degree to which “the hidden world of sound” influences our moods and the choices we make. Although we are more |

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“An iconic rocker receives a warm, admiring biography from a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author.” from jerry lee lewis

JERRY LEE LEWIS His Own Story

the idea of innovation by creating an anthem involving different combinations of four notes. These were the basis of the ring tones now “loaded on hundreds of thousands of phones” and featured in AT&T ads.

Interesting insight on the use of sound bites to merchandise products.

CHINA 1945 Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice Bernstein, Richard Knopf (464 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-307-59588-1

Journalist Bernstein (The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, 2009, etc.), who was the first bureau chief in China for Time, uses his considerable expertise on the Chinese Revolution to create this immensely readable account of how the United States “lost” China to the communists and who was ultimately at fault: the Americans, the Soviets or Mao? The dilemma of whom America should back as the Chinese civil war gained steam—the U.S. officially supported Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Nationalist People’s Party yet did not want to alienate Mao Zedong’s surprisingly resourceful Communists—was further exacerbated by the eight-year war with Japan. That war had consolidated the KMT’s resources, giving Mao a respite from Chiang’s attempts to wipe out the Communists and allowing them to gain an equitable status in fighting No. 1 enemy Japan. The State Department’s “China hands,” who would eventually be vilified as communist sympathizers—e.g., John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent—were “naively dazzled by the Communists in 1944 and 1945” and lulled by Mao’s charm campaign to put aside ideological differences with Chiang in the concerted effort to defeat Japan. Yet once Japan was vanquished and the Soviet Union rolled into Manchuria on Aug. 9, 1945, the Americans, led by Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, continued to be optimistic (at the Yalta Conference, the Americans had agreed to give the Russians “certain privileges in China”), while Chiang, desperate for American support, saw the writing on the wall. Bernstein deftly sifts through the complex machinations of these excruciating few months, when all parties slyly engaged in a similar tactical ploy: “ingratiate yourself with your enemy when you need to keep him at bay, confuse him, or...exploit the ‘contradictions’ between him and other enemies, to prevent them from combining against you.”

A nuanced hindsight assessment that expertly pursues the historical ramification of roads not taken.

Bragg, Rick Harper/HarperCollins (512 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-06-207822-3

An iconic rocker receives a warm, admiring biography from a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author.

Lewis, born in 1935 (delivered by his father) and among the few remaining stars from the early days of rock ’n’ roll, cooperated eagerly—if not always accurately—with Bragg (The Most They Ever Had, 2011, etc.), now a professor (Writing/Univ. of Alabama). The author begins with Lewis’ earliest memory about the piano, the instrument he would ride into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and throughout this account of a most raucous life, the author returns to remind us of Lewis’ enormous gifts as a pianist and showman.

He began playing at an early age and has not quit, arthritis and decay notwithstanding. Among his fans and friends were Elvis Presley (who coaxed Lewis into playing for hours on end) and other luminaries of the era, from Buddy Holly to Johnny Cash.

Bragg gives us lots of family history (Mickey Gilley and evangelist Jimmy Swaggart are cousins) and offers a gripping account of Lewis’ early struggles in the music world, when he would sneak into bars to watch and listen, playing nameless places for endless hours, then finally getting a break at Sun Records and his two biggest hits, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire.” Bragg admirably charts Lewis’ yo-yo life: seven marriages (including one to a teenage first cousin), wealth and penury and wealth again, run-ins with the law (drunk and armed, he rammed his car into the gate at Elvis’ Graceland), and battles with substance abuse (Lewis claims not to have been as big a drinker as rumor insists). Throughout, Bragg displays his characteristic frisky prose. When Lewis played, he writes, “the girls bit their lips and went against their raisin’.”

From a skilled storyteller comes this entertaining, sympathetic story of a life flaring with fire, shuddering with shakin’.

MANDELA My Prisoner, My Friend

Brand, Christo with Jones, Barbara Dunne/St. Martin’s (272 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 18, 2014 978-1-250-05526-2 After more than a decade as a prison guard overseeing Nelson Mandela (19182013), Brand, with the assistance of Mail on Sunday Africa correspondent Jones, chronicles the unlikely personal relation-

ship they built.

The author’s story begins with his idyllic-sounding upbringing. His parents, who raised him in a rural area far from the worst 48

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apartheid policing, taught him kindness and respect for people of all races, but particularly for his elders. So when Brand met his prisoner, a 60-year-old political activist, he was bound to see the respectful, gentle man as someone who deserved his respect in turn. Out of that respect grew a relationship that began as showing kindness when he could and morphed into a willingness to break some rules in order to demonstrate his true humanity to Mandela and his fellow political prisoners. Brand helped Mandela find time alone to study, spoke with him in Afrikaans when Mandela was learning the language, spent time with the prisoner when he was in isolation and made sure some little luxuries were available. Eventually, the two became friends, with Mandela even helping to put Brand’s son through schooling for a career as a commercial diver.

The prose is straightforward, but the lack of flowery language makes it refreshingly easy to focus on the story without distraction.

This isn’t a full biography of Mandela, so those looking for more information about his politics, party or background should seek out supplemental materials. The author quickly recounts Mandela’s general biography, including the Rivonia trial for sabotage that landed him in prison, but this is really a tale of two men and their shared humanity in an inhumane place.

A worthy addition to the canon of Mandela literature that details a relationship that many knew about but few truly understood.

MELTDOWN IN TIBET China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia

Buckley, Michael Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-137-27954-5

A grim, relentless exposé of the plundering of Tibet’s natural resources

by China.

A Canadian journalist who has found his way into the secret workings of an oppressed country via trekking, kayaking and documenting the issues, Buckley (co-author of Lonely Planet’s first guidebook to Tibet in 1986) sounds the alarm on what he calls China’s eco-cide of fragile, high-altitude Tibet. He notes all of the devastation that is taking place with impunity and in secret: deforestation (to the tune of 50 percent of Tibet’s forests since China moved into the country in 1950; this has represented $50 billion for construction and manufacturing); damming of important rivers whose waters have sustained populations in the deltas of India, Nepal, Pakistan and others yet are now diverted to thirsty Chinese cities; tunnel boring through sacred mountains for mineral extraction via railroads and the conveying of a huge influx of Chinese Han settlers that beleaguer the scant 6 million Tibetan Buddhist natives; and the sad, silent disappearance of wildlife such as the Tibetan gazelle and black-necked crane. The Tibetan Plateau is called the “Third Pole” due to the significance of its glaciers, which are melting at an alarming rate thanks to climate change. Since |

2006, China has the dubious distinction of being the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other gases, largely due to coal.

China has also engaged in a dam-building frenzy, harnessing hydropower not for the Tibetans, who are scarcely consulted, but for the needs of the billions of Chinese. Unlike in India, public protests are circumvented by authoritarian speed and secrecy; moreover, the Tibetan nomads are removed forcibly from their ancestral grasslands and rendered ecological migrants. Buckley’s concluding tribute to idyllic Bhutan is eye-opening and provides a stark contrast to the bleak picture of Tibet.

A passionately committed environmental activist unearths China’s criminal, ongoing policy of resource extraction.

SNOW AND STEEL The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45 Caddick-Adams, Peter Oxford Univ. (872 pp.) $34.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-19-933514-5

A comprehensive account of the bloodiest battle in American history.

Caddick-Adams (Military History/U.K. Defence Academy; Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, 2013, etc.) points out that beginning in 1943, Hitler stopped appearing in public, and his knowledge of the world was based solely on phone, radio and written reports. The failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, organized by army officers, did not improve his usual paranoia and made him even less inclined to listen to military advisers. Announced in September 1944, a massive offensive was “irrational, counterintuitive, even suicidal.” It was less a counterattack than a “political game-changer that would shatter the coalition ranged against him” and prove to the nation that, despite the plot to remove him, he was still in control. As expected, his generals hated it. The buildup required withdrawing essential forces from the Russian front, denuding the remaining reserves, and creating new units of poorly equipped and inadequately trained men formerly considered too young or too old to fight. Launched on Dec. 16, 1944, it succeeded brilliantly for a week and then stalled as defenders fought with unexpected stubbornness, the terrible weather took its toll, and superior numbers, technology and logistics (the Wehrmacht depended on horse-drawn transport) won the day. As Caddick-Adams notes, “campaigns like the Ardennes remind us that in most cases to prosecute war with success ultimately you must do this on the ground...by putting your young men (and today, women) in the mud.” The author also provides a comprehensive glossary and two sections that will be of most interest to military historians: “Orders of Battle” and the “comparative rank structures” of the German, American and British forces.

Filling over 800 pages, Caddick-Adams casts a wide net, delving deep into the background, conduct, consequences and even historiography of this iconic battle, so even experienced military buffs will find plenty to ponder. kirkus.com

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“A well-researched study of Chinese-American food, the people who brought it to our neighborhoods and how Americans grew to love it.” from chop suey, usa

ARDOR

Calasso, Roberto Translated by Dixon, Richard Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 18, 2014 978-0-374-18231-1 An alternately illuminating and baffling exploration of the primary texts of Indian philosophy and religion.

Whether he’s dealing with Greek mythology (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1993), Franz Kafka (K., 2006) or the French Symbolists (La Folie Baudelaire, 2012), Calasso is always concerned with the ways his subjects alter the consciousness of their times.

His latest book gives him more than enough to work with: the Vedas, the ancient compilations of Sanskrit hymns, mythology and philosophy that are the only remaining artifacts of a lost world of ancient India, a civilization “in which the invisible prevailed over the visible.” Millennia before Descartes, the Vedic authors and poets were fully aware of mankind as the thinking animal. “For the Vedic people,” writes Calasso, “everything came from consciousness, in the sense of pure awareness devoid of any other attribute.” The author pursues his own quest for enlightenment by questioning, treading carefully and humbling himself before a body of knowledge that has not always been well-served by his Western predecessors. (“Is it possible to hold that ‘our way of thinking’ is so barren and desolate that it doesn’t embrace, at least to some extent, thinking in images?”)

He’s more interesting exploring this world than interpreting its texts; he tends to go off into the ether when in expository mode, and his thoughts don’t always naturally evolve. He’s more eloquent when he’s examining how this old world informs our concepts of sacrifice and the morality of killing and what the loss of transcendence means to modern life. He asks, in the end, whether religion has been adequately replaced by a “secularized society that can no longer see nature or any other power beyond itself and believes it is itself the answer for everything.”

“The whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further,” writes Calasso. He demands no less from his readers.

(18 color illustrations; 10 b/w illustrations)

CHOP SUEY, USA The Story of Chinese Food in America Chen, Yong Columbia Univ. (352 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-231-16892-2

Chen (History/Univ. of California, Irvine; Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, 2000) shows how enterprising immigrants turned Chinese food, reviled by 19th-century Americans, into one of the country’s favorite ethnic meals.

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Although there are a few recipes included, the book is more a socioeconomic/cultural study than a culinary one. The author, who grew up in China and came to America in the mid1980s, shows how the intersection of Chinese immigration and America’s habits of consumption incubated a thriving restaurant culture. When Chinese men came without their families to seek their fortunes during the mid-19th-century gold rush, they faced racism and isolation. Driven out of mining and railroad jobs by hostile white workers, many became cooks and servants. Paradoxically, white middle-class families sought Chinese domestic workers for their work ethic, reliability and loyalty.

Even low-income households could afford a Chinese servant, who learned to cook American fare, relieving the housewife of kitchen duties. Ostracized by white society, Chinese men lived in enclaves, forerunners of Chinatowns in large cities, and restaurants emerged to serve these communities and others on the margins of society. With cheap, plentiful, good food, these establishments “played a vital role in the democratization of consumption,” making eating out an affordable experience for all. In one of the most arresting sections of the book, Chen explains the unique social history connecting Chinese food and African-American and Jewish cultures. The author’s prose style is more slow cooking than spicy stir-fry, but his passion for the subject carries readers through the dry spots. Dipping into culinary concerns with chapters on “authentic” Chinese cuisine and cookbooks, he also delivers a perceptive view of an America built on abundance and consumption.

A well-researched study of Chinese-American food, the people who brought it to our neighborhoods and how Americans grew to love it.

GHOSTS A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof Clarke, Roger St. Martin’s (368 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-250-05357-2

Ghost-hunting gets a gentlemanly makeover in this meticulous history of hauntings.

Clarke indulges his lifelong interest in the paranormal in this well-documented look at ghost stories and the people who have told them throughout history. As the youngest person ever to become a member of the Society for Psychical Research, the author has pursued his passion since childhood—and it shows. He covers everything in loving detail, from Victorian mobs congregating at haunted houses to Harry Price’s 1920s radio show, which helped launch modern ghosthunting. Excerpts from letters, illustrations of experiments and many complex family trees ground in reality what could be dismissed as fantasy. Clarke’s discussions of geography also lend realism. England is the focus throughout: The English countryside, class distinctions and small-town gossip feature nearly as prominently as the ghost stories themselves. The author relates |

all of this information in the same smooth, careful style, presenting them truly as natural history and not necessarily as spine-tingling stories, although some are spooky enough even when viewed through Clarke’s objective lens. This objectivity cuts two ways in the narrative: The author’s open-mindedness is admirable and suitable to a work billed as a “social history,” but the attendant ambiguity saps the sense of direction sorely needed in such a detailed book. When Clarke touches on the cultural history of ghost stories—how their social classes, gender and even fashions have changed with the times—he begins to invite readers to consider the reasons behind these oft-told tales, but then he quickly changes direction. The book will be more useful as a reference than an afternoon’s entertainment, and Clarke also provides a useful index, a chronology and a reference list that will serve other paranormal researchers well.

An informative but surprisingly sedate tour of haunting’s storied past.

WIDOW BASQUIAT A Love Story

A disturbing and poetic biography of a talented but massively flawed artist.

CHINESE RULES Mao’s Dog, Deng’s Cat, and Five Timeless Lessons from the Front Lines in China

Clissold, Tim Harper/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-231657-8

A pragmatic application of goodsense peasant wisdom in negotiating big financial deals with the Chinese.

An investment analyst who returned to his native England with his family in the mid-2000s after 20 years living in China, only to be lured back by a new high-stakes venture in “carbon credits” (“not the black stuff ”), Clissold (Mr. China: A Memoir,

Clement, Jennifer Broadway (208 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-553-41991-7

A provocative account of the passionate but stormy relationship between a Canadian runaway named Suzanne Mallouk and acclaimed New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988).

In 1980, Mallouk left a dysfunctional home in Canada for New York. With its bold and brashly inventive art scene, the city seemed the perfect place for a girl who wore paper dresses, hid heroin in her beehive hairdo and believed that she “had seen God” in Iggy Pop. Not long after she arrived, she met Basquiat at a dive bar on the Lower East Side. Basquiat immediately moved into Mallouk’s apartment, where he spent his days drawing, masturbating or snorting cocaine. At night, he would often go alone to clubs to pick up boys or girls and disappear with them for days at a time. Despite the unfaithfulness and his drug habit—which Mallouk shared for a time—she still supported the painter, loving him even after he infected her with the pelvic inflammatory disease that would leave her infertile. Basquiat became her addiction. When New York galleries and hipsters like Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol began to discover Basquiat’s “jazz on canvas” paintings, Basquiat would spend his wealth indiscriminately, buying Armani suits only to ruin them with paint and renting limousines so he could throw $100 bills to bums in the street. Fame only made him even more erratic. Mallouk held on, fighting for him with other women, including, most famously, Madonna. Yet in the end, her love proved no match for Basquiat’s addiction to heroin. Not only would the drug destroy their relationship, but also the painter himself. With short, episodic chapters, Clement (Prayers for the Stolen, 2014, etc.) delivers real insight into the life of the brilliant artist as well as the glittering—but ultimately chaotic—world that consumed him. |

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“Always entertaining and meticulously composed, this book will reorient your relationship with the quantum.” from the quantum moment

2005) chronicles the whole quirky yet lucrative journey. During his years in China, the author had learned to abandon some basic (Western) assumptions about society, business and government: “I’d learned the hard way that if you wanted to survive in China, it had to be on Chinese terms.” As a fluent speaker of Mandarin, Clissold was approached by a fast-talking Australian entrepreneur to help put together a mega-deal that would aid polluting Chinese companies with the installations of new equipment (incinerators available only in Japan) to reduce the country’s enormous greenhouse gas emission crisis. The English syndicate of investors researched horribly polluting factories in places like Hangzhou and helped fund the purchase of incinerators, then offered carbon credits on the eager European market. However, the way of doing business in China was not so straightforward or transparent, and the deal threatened to fall through. Hence the need for Clissold’s particular brand of patient, frequently amusing translation (“even a beast like a thousand-pound ox must lower its head to drink”). Between dispensing old saws about the futility of changing ancient ways, the author walks readers through the first attempts to crack China’s markets, namely by Lord Macartney in 1792, and subsequent resistance to outside change all the way to Mao Zedong. The author’s “rules” of respecting China’s particular way of doing business include the overarching need for stability and the use of indirection, among others.

Clissold’s deep knowledge of Chinese culture and language informs this useful work.

THE QUANTUM MOMENT How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love

Crease, Robert P.; Goldhaber, Alfred Scharff Norton (352 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 13, 2014 978-0-393-06792-7

A history of some of the most “forceful, imaginative, and insightful” minds in quantum theory and how the world became entranced by their scientific language.

The lyrical vocabulary of quantum mechanics is all around us—the word “quantum” alone is used to describe seemingly every entity on Earth—despite the fact that very few individuals, if anyone, truly understand how quantum mechanics works.

Ideas like entanglement and superposition have specific mathematical correlations and imply bizarre and beautiful things about the universe and how it behaves. Popular culture, on the other hand, takes a lot of creative liberty, and the results illuminate human nature on a different, but perhaps no less beautiful, scale. Crease (World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, 2011, etc.) and Goldhaber, professors of philosophy and physics at Stony Brook University, recount a series of historical moments that occurred during the development of quantum mechanics in order to demonstrate 52

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how quickly and profoundly scientific language worked its way into the artistic objects we love. Countless writers, artists and philosophers have taken ideas from the quantum realm and applied them as metaphors for the human condition. Through the authors’ careful and vivid storytelling, science and culture inspire and reflect one another, from Einstein’s theories of relativity to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to modern conceptions of causality. The authors keep their discussions of these dense topics clear and fun to read without sacrificing detail by including technical “interludes” between chapters. Crease and Goldhaber provide an excellent reminder that quantum mechanics affects so much of what we do and say and that concepts imagined 100 years ago will influence the physical and intellectual spaces we inhabit in the future.

Always entertaining and meticulously composed, this book will reorient your relationship with the quantum. (61 illustrations; maps)

GLOBAL RULES America, Britain and a Disordered World

Cronin, James E. Yale Univ. (416 pp.) $45.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-300-15148-0

A scholarly pursuit of the marketfriendly policies put in effect by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shows a paradigm shift still going strong today.

The “rules” of the new world order after the Cold War involved a triumph of market-orientated democracy led by the U.S. and Great Britain, as Cronin (History/Boston Coll.) delineates in his nonpolemical study. Since World War II, the economic paradigm of state intervention and low unemployment prevailed with varied success. Yet by the 1970s, the paradigm was no longer able to properly deal with escalating inflation, conflicting “stop-go” measures and accompanying slowdown, both in the U.S. and Britain—and the latter was bedeviled by bitter clashes with the trade unions. Enter Reagan and Thatcher roughly at the same time on the world stage, presenting their transformational visions away from the assumption that the state is responsible for ensuring full employment and economic well-being and toward policies of cutting taxes and paring down expenditures. Cronin sees the accession of these two leaders as a “reaction” to populist measures by a new set of (business) interests bent on a “cold logic of redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top.” Indeed, the author notes how these policies created a kind of “class war”—a clear new set of winners and losers. Reagan and Thatcher’s free market approach also extended to their views on the rest of the world— e.g., in combating communism and creating a huge military strength to back it up. Their “market revolutions” were meant to be enduring, and subsequent leaders would have a hard time reversing course, especially Democratic presidents Bill Clinton |

FORGETTING TO BE AFRAID A Memoir

and Barack Obama. Cronin meticulously leads readers through 30 years of development of networks and institutions vitally linked to this “open, market-oriented world order.”

A well-researched, tightly presented study of government policies on both sides of the Atlantic.

BERKSHIRE BEYOND BUFFETT The Enduring Value of Values Cunningham, Lawrence A. Columbia Univ. (320 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-231-17004-8

Cunningham (Business Law/George Washington Univ.; Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter, 2012, etc.) discusses whether Berkshire Hathaway, the investment vehicle for billionaire Warren Buffett, will outlive the death of its founder and why.

As the editor and publisher of Buffett’s annual letters to Berkshire’s shareholders and someone who knows his subject personally, the author will no doubt be considered an authoritative source by most readers. Cunningham also consulted with other Berkshire insiders, including owners—e.g., Buffett’s son Howard, a co-director of Berkshire, and Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, formerly of Wesco Financial—and managers of operating subsidiaries. The author provides a full history and profile of Berkshire’s major subsidiaries, as well as the company’s Class A shareholders. Cunningham isn’t just interested in the history of Buffett and Berkshire, however. He is in search of the protective “moat” that shelters Buffett’s creation from competitors seeking to increase their market shares. Initially, the author thought it might be Buffett himself or that it was predicated on the “float” of his insurance companies (the difference between claims paid out and premiums paid in). The author concludes that Berkshire is protected by its unique culture, which constitutes its potential for survival. Organizationally complex and “highly decentralized,” with twice the number of separate business units as General Electric, Berkshire embraces family-owned businesses, like Benjamin Moore Paints, as well as self-starters. It is a publicly quoted company that also owns private companies and franchises like Dairy Queen. Cunningham believes that the disparate businesses are held together by their shared beliefs about the ethical purposes and responsibilities of business. These traits have also combined to allow them to successfully avoid the pitfalls of buyouts, asset stripping, public offerings and indebtedness.

Not exactly an independent point of view but one that will surely provoke much curiosity.

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Davis, Wendy Blue Rider Press (320 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-399-17057-7

Texas gubernatorial candidate Davis delivers a political biography that is better—in part because it’s better written, in part because it’s more heartfelt—than most books of its kind.

Davis burst onto the national stage last year with a carefully mounted filibuster of the Texas Senate “to defeat an anti-abortion bill, giving voice to thousands and thousands of women pleading to preserve their access to lifesaving health care and reproductive rights.” Among the news that emerges from the book, and by artful design, is the fact that Davis herself had to have recourse to the procedure due to an ectopic pregnancy that required removal of a fallopian tube, “which in Texas is technically considered an abortion, and doctors have to report it as such.” Hard-line anti-abortion activists probably won’t be swayed by Davis’ thoughtful, somber account of the tragedy, but it is affecting and unsentimental. Her account of her peripatetic, shy childhood (“I was not an expected child and my parents didn’t greet the news with great happiness”) is similarly moving. Rather more rote is her account of college and law school. Though she worked harder than most as a young mother without much in the way of family resources, all the expected tropes are there: the feeling of being the smartest kid in the class on arriving at Harvard and the dumbest within five minutes or so, the backbreaking toughness of contracts class. Davis’ recollection is that she threw herself into politics without much preparation, without having nursed a long desire to be president or a congresswoman, but it’s clear from her accounts of maneuvering through various bills and factions that she’s good at horse trading. She’s good at writing, too, and her closing account of that famed filibuster is a dramatic, textbook case of how to play hardball.

Doubtless we’ll be hearing more from Davis. This modest memoir makes it clear why even her opponents should pay attention to her.

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“The light of Dawisha’s research penetrates a deep moral darkness, revealing something ugly—and dangerous.” from putin’s kleptocracy

PUTIN’S KLEPTOCRACY Who Owns Russia?

THE FORMULA How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems—and Create More

Dawisha, Karen Simon & Schuster (464 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-4767-9519-5

A damning account of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and of the vast dimensions of the corruption—political and economic—that both reigns and rots in Russia.

Dawisha (Political Science/Miami Univ.; The Consolidation of Democracy in East Central Europe, 1997, etc.) begins with the recent crisis in Crimea, then swiftly moves to unsnarl “the tangled web of relationships” that enabled Putin to thrive, that keep him in power, and that direct enormous fortunes into the hands of Putin and his cronies—we’re talking billions. Dawisha’s research is extremely impressive. Drawing on leaked documents, interviews and old-fashioned excavation, she describes the intricate complications of the power relationships in Russia (naming many names) and eventually shows how they continue to damage the country. With so much wealth concentrated in so few hands, public services have faltered, infrastructure has aged and cracked, and technological research and progress stutter and stumble. Dawisha includes numerous detailed footnotes and some clear diagrams that chart the egregious greed in the country, but mostly this is a powerful story about the return to authoritarianism in a country that had begun to breathe a bit of free air. In his first 100 days, Putin clamped down on the media, surrounded himself with loyalists, shoved out opponents, changed the symbolism of the country (returning to prominence a version of the old Soviet national anthem), embraced international organized crime, enriched those who supported him, impoverished and even imprisoned those who didn’t, avoided prosecutions on earlier corruption charges, and forced the media to portray him as “the undisputed Leader of his People.” He continues to misinform and deceive the public about international events, and the author demonstrates how all this corruption greatly diminishes the profitability of Russia’s sizable energy reserves.

The light of Dawisha’s research penetrates a deep moral darkness, revealing something ugly—and dangerous.

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Dormehl, Luke Perigee/Penguin (288 pp.) $24.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-399-17053-9

The story of the myriad ways that algorithms are impacting our lives, from Fast Company senior writer Dormehl.

An algorithm is a series of step-bystep instructions, these days typically carried out by a computer for speed in regard to the abundance of data being considered.

The author zeroes in on the metadata and how to navigate through all the information available to arrive at an actionable conclusion. So can a reductive formula provide answers for complex, multifaceted questions? Set aside objectivity and technorationality and take the formulation of algorithms as a given, the inputs chosen for all sorts of reasons. Concentrate instead on the algorithms that Dormehl presents for our deliberation.

One involves reading key biomarkers to preventatively track bodily health, especially in those instances where the problem is discernable only in blood work. Another may track your clothes-buying preferences on the Internet. One feels like Big Brother, the other like your mother. There is no sense that Dormehl is trying to sell you anything. He chooses his anecdotes wisely, and he is mindful of the innate distrust experienced when talking about the “quantifiable self ” and its zealots, with all their techno-determinism and statistical inferences. The author is in search of patterns, and he takes into account the “unmeasurable” (“personality traits, emotional attributes, sociability”), chaos theory, cultural conditions and existential crises, as well as Steven Pinker’s humanistic counteralgorithm regarding marriage: “[Y]ou’re in love because you can’t help it.” Still, Dormehl tenders a good number of useful algorithms, including predictive policing (which requires significant oversight to avoid discrimination of all types) and algorithmic sampling for the tedium of legal discovery. To avoid our yearning for easy answers and belief in skin-deep objectivity, the author suggests ways to avoid manipulation and explores the problems of transparency and taming unchecked governmental policymaking.

The algorithmization of life reveals both good and dark sides, and in this lucid book, Dormehl, a good-sider, rightly cautions to never lose a measure of control.

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NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “learned” Dunham, Lena Random House (288 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-8129-9499-5 978-0-8041-2731-8 Audiobook

Girls creator Dunham reveals all— about losing her virginity, finding a therapist, shooting a series of Web videos about 20-somethings living aimless lives and more.

The book’s jacket recalls the 1970s, when Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown was coaching “mouseburgers” on “having it all.” Dunham opens by saying she’d like to do the same thing for today’s young women that Brown did for her when she picked up Having It All at a thrift store when she was in college: Let them know “a powerful, confident, and yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born.” Dunham then spends the first two sections of the book, “Love & Sex” and “Body,” writing mostly about embarrassing sex, bad breakups and traumatic trips to the gynecologist (“Last summer my vagina started to sting”) while forestalling criticism by saying that her “true friends,” those she imagined when she was an unhappy college student, would “never, ever say ‘too much information’ when you mention a sex dream you had about your father.” The problem isn’t that the author gives us too much information; the problem is that it’s repetitive and often boring, lacking the humor and stylishness of Nora Ephron or Tina Fey. Things pick up in the third section, “Friendship,” but it’s a bit surprising to read this on Page 129: “I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women…I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by.” So why take so long to get to them? The fourth section, “Work,” provides some interesting background on Dunham’s life leading up to Girls, but the last section, “Big Picture,” feels like odds and ends that didn’t fit elsewhere, including essays on therapy, summer camp and hypochondria.

Dunham shows flashes of the humor and sharp eye that make Girls so compelling, but the pleasure of watching the TV show doesn’t translate to the page.

project hatched by four New York University students that too quickly gained attention worldwide among digital cognoscenti and “shot like a comet through the venture capital wings of Silicon Valley, but flamed out.” The author explores the strong personalities behind it, quintessential millennials with an intense focus on the virtual world (and quirky pursuits like Burning Man). Unfortunately, the most idealistic of the four became so overwhelmed that he committed suicide at age 22, a looming tragedy that checks Dwyer’s tone of futurist optimism. At first, Diaspora’s bright prospects were due to its open-source software code and a promise of user-controlled data. Suspicious about how Facebook “hoarded and peddled personal information without so much as asking,” the founders attracted supporters worldwide. An initial Kickstarter campaign allowed them to set up shop in San Francisco and spend a year coding; however, the four principals thwarted their own ambitions, starting with a disastrous meeting with a venture capital firm that they alienated with a $10 million “ask.” As Dwyer notes, “Diaspora did not fall under the standard rubric for evaluating startups.” Despite his positive spin (he followed the project

MORE AWESOME THAN MONEY Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook

Dwyer, Jim Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 20, 2014 978-0-670-02560-2

Journalistic account of an ambitious, ill-fated attempt at creating a privacyoriented alternative to Facebook.

New York Times columnist Dwyer (co-author: 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, 2004, etc.) lays out the improbable narrative of Diaspora, a |

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“A superb, quietly devastating environmental and business history.” from citizen coke

from its early days as a columnist), the project never seemed close to practicality. As the rambling narrative follows the crew through many tech-geek happenings and increasingly tense board meetings, the author chronicles how Diaspora’s most promising components were ruthlessly emulated by competitors: “Google came out with circles months after Diaspora had introduced the aspects settings, each of them a digital corral...it was a perfect example of how quickly digital innovation could lose its novelty.” Ultimately, the increasingly estranged partners entered a venture-capitalist incubator program and were advised to abandon the project, though volunteers continue to develop its source code.

Slowly paced, familiar narrative of tech dreams and youthful hubris.

CITIZEN COKE The Making of CocaCola Capitalism Elmore, Bartow J. Norton (304 pp.) $27.95 | Nov. 3, 2014 978-0-393-24112-9

An eye-opening account of the “unmatched ecological appetite” behind Coca-Cola’s worldwide success.

In this deeply informed debut, Elmore (History/Univ. of Alabama) details the outsourcing strategy that he calls “Coca-Cola Capitalism,” which has allowed Coke to become the world’s top brand, with operations in more than 200 countries, at a huge cost to the environment and human health. Acknowledging the company’s marketing genius, Elmore claims that Coke’s real secret formula has been to rely on other people’s time and money, often using public infrastructure to extract raw materials and transport finished products.

The strategy—first developed by mass marketers at the turn of the 20th century and later imitated by McDonald’s, large software firms and other corporations—eliminates upfront costs and risky investments. Since its founding in 1886, Coke has relied on partnerships for the sugar, caffeine, water, cans and bottles, and other raw materials needed to create its beverages (now selling more than 1.8 billion servings per day). Drawing on archival sources, the author devotes chapters to the ecological impact of each key Coke ingredient. At little cost, the company uses 79 billion gallons of public water supplies yearly to dilute Coke syrup and an estimated 8 trillion gallons to produce bottles and agricultural commodities. The company also has bottling operations in many arid world regions. Elmore describes how Coke has weathered supply disruptions and controversies regarding caffeine and sugar obtained from others and how its huge success during World War II paved the way for overseas expansion. In recent years, the company’s sugary beverages have been a major factor in the worldwide obesity epidemic.

Without a doubt, Coke has been a good public citizen that stimulates economies and improves lives, writes the author, but the costs to taxpayers—for recycling systems, public pipes and 56

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subsidized farms—and the environment call into question how such unsustainable practices can continue in an age of scarcity.

A superb, quietly devastating environmental and business history.

AS YOU WISH Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

Elwes, Cary with Layden, Joe Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-4767-6402-3

With the assistance of Layden (The Ghost Horse: A True Story of Love, Death, and Redemption, 2013, etc.), Elwes shares tales of the making of the 1987 film The Princess Bride, in which he starred in the role of Westley.

By the time Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andy Scheinman decided to make a film version of William Goldman’s book, Goldman’s screenplay adaptation had become legendary in Hollywood as an unproduced script. Robert Redford, Norman Jewison and even Francois Truffaut had all tried and failed to get the movie past development stages. Elwes gives a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the movie and theorizes on how an infamously unproducible script became a cult classic. The book is driven by the author’s thoughts and memories but is complemented by rich quotes featured in pop-out text boxes from Reiner, Scheinman, Goldman and other stars of the film, including Christopher Guest, Robin Wright and Billy Crystal. Elwes’ description of how Reiner’s simple stage directions helped achieve his tongue-in-check vision, or Scheinman’s thoughts on how today’s special effects may have overwhelmed and ruined the gently satirical tone of the movie, are interesting from a broad cinematic perspective. But the book is intended less for film aficionados than simply for lovers of this specific movie. As a rookie star in his first big production, Elwes often felt “like a kid at theater camp who has been suddenly plucked from the ranks of the ordinary and tossed onto a Broadway stage,” and while his observations ooze with positivity, they come across as genuine.

The book, unlike the movie it describes, struggles at times to balance a tone of charming over cheesy. But Elwes’ case—that the film has endured because it was made with a lot of heart—is made persuasively enough that readers will entertain the sentiment even if they aren’t totally convinced by it.

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ADA’S ALGORITHM How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age Essinger, James Melville House (288 pp.) $25.95 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-61219-408-0

The story of Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), the brilliant mathematician and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who likely wrote the first computer program in the early 1840s. Due to her gender, however, her research was overlooked, and another two centuries passed before computers became a reality.

Despite the fact that Ada was Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, her mother deemed him unfit to raise her and left him when Ada was just 1 month old. Her father’s reputation made Ada famous by association, and throughout her life, this recognition connected her with some of the era’s most interesting and accomplished people, including the mathematician Charles Babbage. As a child, Ada was fascinated by mathematics and demonstrated an “imaginative approach to science.”

Through sheer force of will, she managed to obtain an education rarely available to women in the 19th century and was therefore able to recognize the profound potential in Babbage’s lifelong obsession, a machine he called the “Analytical Engine,” designed to make calculations. Babbage considered his invention to be purely mathematical, but Ada realized that the possibilities were much grander—that the machine could be capable of “weav[ing] algebraical patterns,” a sophisticated idea that did not yet exist at the time. In her writings, she clearly laid out these early concepts of computer science, but because she was female, she was essentially ignored. Essinger (Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling, 2007, etc.) presents Ada’s story with great enthusiasm and rich detail, painting her life as one that was rich with opportunity and access but stifled by sexism. Ada continues to inspire, and by using her own voice via letters and research, the author brings her to life for a new generation of intrepid female innovators.

A robust, engaging and exciting biography.

THE GOOD WAR Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan Fairweather, Jack Basic (368 pp.) $29.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-465-04495-5

A reconsideration of “how the world’s most powerful leaders plotted to build a new kind of nation in Afghanistan that was pure fantasy.” |

Bloomberg News Middle East editor and correspondent Fairweather (War of Choice: The British in Iraq 2003-9, 2011) finds American naïveté and confusion of purpose at the crux of what went wrong in the war in Afghanistan. The original defeat of the Taliban in 2001 was almost too swift to be true, and early on, President George W. Bush insisted that the United States was “not into nation-building; we are focused on justice.” Then, the U.S. shifted the focus to Iraq, allowing the Afghan warlords to duke it out, especially the opportunistic, CIA-backed Hamid Karzai. As the Taliban began to creep back in and the provinces fell into anarchy and opium-growing (once quelled under the austere Taliban), the American administration underwent a philosophical shift. With Iraq then in tatters, a humanitarian aim of rebuilding the country took over. Yet corruption skimmed the aid money, and U.S. engineering firms had little knowledge of the local environment, and there was virtually no oversight. The creation of a series of Provincial Reconstruction Teams was an attempt to tie local tribal connections to a central authority, and some of Karzai’s appointed governors were removed—Helmand’s Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, who was overseeing a vast, lucrative opium-growing network. The clamor for more money and more troops became the recurrent cri de coeur, drowning out sounder arguments, including that of British ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles, who called for more tribal engagement and negotiations with the Taliban. While the efforts to commit Afghan children to education were successful, the miserable litany of IEDs, troop surge, counterinsurgency, fraudulent elections, runaway generals, drone strikes and immense waste underscores what Fairweather calls the “futility of force.”

A thorough, elegant reassessment of America’s “irresistible illusion.”

WORTH FIGHTING FOR An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America Fanning, Rory Haymarket (230 pp.) $16.95 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-60846-391-6

An Army Ranger–turned–conscientious objector pays tribute to a fallen comrade with a walk across America.

Pat Tillman was hailed as a hero when he walked away from NFL millions to enlist in the war against terrorism. Yet he became even more of a hero to Fanning for retaining his critical faculties and refusing to follow blindly the conditioning of military authorities. “Pat Tillman was the first person to suggest to me that it was possible to stand up to the US military,” writes the author. “[T]he fact remains that I am alive today, or at least less damaged, because of Pat Tillman.” The two weren’t exactly foxhole buddies, and Fanning admits that they didn’t know each other well. Yet by the time Tillman was killed, the author was on his way out of the military as a commanding officer, shunned kirkus.com

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“Flint’s life of ‘the original star architect’ astutely captures Le Corbusier’s hubris and vulnerabilities and makes a persuasive case for his artistic significance.” from modern man

by the rest of the Army Rangers who had considered him one of them. Since the cause of death was revealed as “friendly fire,” followed by a coverup, Tillman became a different sort of hero to America, and Fanning vowed to walk across the country to raise funds, and consciousness, for the benefit of Tillman’s foundation. In the aftermath, he has written this curious book about his mission—partly an evocation of “the bloody birth of the nation I now walked through” and its often troubled history, part memoir of the author’s transformation from conservative Christian soldier to radical atheist and pacifist, part indictment of a foreign policy in which “Iraq felt like a bait-and-switch— and a betrayal.” But mostly it’s about the people he met in the small towns he visited and the encouragement they gave him.

“The walk wasn’t changing the world like I hoped, but I was changing,” he writes.

Fanning’s dedication to the cause is admirable, but readers are left wondering how the author thought he would change the world by walking across the country.

MODERN MAN The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow

Flint, Anthony Amazon Publishing/New Harvest (288 pp.) $25.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-544-26222-5 The life and work of an iconic modernist.

In 1920, Swiss-born architect CharlesEdouard Jeanneret-Gris changed his name to Le Corbusier (1887-1965). The dramatic “single moniker,” writes journalist Flint (Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, 2009, etc.), “signaled his break with the past...and the embrace of the modern.” The author ably chronicles Le Corbusier’s pursuit of the modern in designs that remained remarkably consistent during his long career. In villas, apartment complexes and public buildings, Le Corbusier conceived stark, concrete structures perched on concrete columns, with open-plan interiors swathed in natural light and containing minimalist furniture, such as the metal tubing and leather chairs designed by a member of his firm. His wife found the ambience dispiriting: It was like living in a hospital, she complained, or “a dissecting lab!” Some clients, although impressed by the theatricality of the imposing architecture, found living within its walls uncomfortable, especially in a villa that became inundated with water after every rain. Le Corbusier had grander ambitions than simply designing for wealthy clients. During World War II, he nimbly allied himself with the Vichy government, hoping to redesign Paris after the war’s destruction; in 1945, he easily—and with no repercussions—switched sides. He envisioned entire cities “with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life.” Constructed rigidly on a grid, with large spaces between buildings comprised 58

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of small modular apartments, the cities would include schools, shops and extensive roof gardens representing the natural landscape. Critics asserted that he was blind to people’s real lives and the interactions that created community, but Le Corbusier believed that well-designed density, “a repeatable urban form,” was the overriding need of the future.

Flint’s life of “the original star architect” astutely captures Le Corbusier’s hubris and vulnerabilities and makes a persuasive case for his artistic significance.

THE LOST ELEMENTS The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side Fontani, Marco; Costa, Mariagrazia; Orna, Mary Virginia Oxford Univ. (568 pp.) $39.95 | Nov. 3, 2014 978-0-19-938334-4

Chemists Fontani, Costa (both Univ. of Florence) and Orna (Coll. of New Rochelle) travel the pathway to the identification and classification of the elements.

The subject is challenging—it’s chemistry, after all, with some physics—and the narrative is packed with notes, graphs, charts and numbers, but this tour of the obstacles and errors encountered on the way to filling in the periodic table is at once nimble and thorough. The authors have gathered centuries of false starts and wishful thinking in pursuit of the elements.

Though they begin with Aristotle’s embroidery on the ideas of Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus, the meat of the volume covers the last 300 years, as the authors move from Thales and Lavoisier to the periodic table and the particle accelerator.

They explore all the fits and fortunes that evolved into the periodic table, from the organizing principles of atomic weight and atomic number to such anomalies as radioactivity (“How could a hitherto stable, substance-specific simple body be changing right before [physicist Henri Becquerel’s] eyes?”). They also look at the tenants who sought membership in the kingdom of the periodic table and provide tightly strung, vest-pocket biographies of their creators. In addition to the chronicles of mind-spinning science, there are moments of high and low humor (elements that never made it: mussolinium and bastardium), Sherlock Holmes–esque detection (“The Curious Case of the Triple Discovery of Actinium”), and competitive pettiness (“Their arguments became trifling and the proposed symbols became illegal squatters in the periodic table”). Even the New Yorker makes an appearance: “We are already at work in our office laboratories on ‘newium’ and ‘yorkium.’ So far we just have the names.” An appendix offers a “Chronological Finder’s Guide for the Lost Elements.”

Many general readers will find the book too dense, but for students and scholars, this is a choice, spirited history of the false discoveries, semi-retractions, abandonments, discoveries and rediscoveries of nature’s building blocks.

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AMORE An American Father’s Roman Holiday

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION Learning and Culture From the Founding to World War II

Friedland, Roger Perennial/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $15.99 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-232558-7

Cultural sociologist Friedland (Religious Studies and Sociology/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 2006, etc.) examines the life-changing “love lessons” he learned from the city of Rome.

For the author, the Italian city became a personal touchstone for love and romance after he and his wife honeymooned there as a young couple. He would return to the city several times afterward, growing more fascinated each time with the way Romans combined sex and love without guilt, shame or fear.

In the early 2000s, just as his two girls were entering adolescence, he was offered a chance to teach students at the University of Rome, students who had very different ideas about sex and love than their American counterparts. As Friedland watched his daughters begin to negotiate puberty away from the “West Coast world of blowjobs and Botox,” he came to know students for whom affection and loyalty were crucial parts of the erotic— and eventually, marriage—equation. The author suggests that this attitude stems from the way male and female bodies are openly celebrated and enjoyed in Italian culture and from the fact that in Italy, personal and familial connections serve as a bulwark against unreliable institutions. In the U.S., where an element of shame has always traditionally surrounded sexuality, it is more difficult for young people to reconcile romance with the erotic. The sexual revolution, which was supposed to liberate people from inhibition, actually had the unintended consequence of separating emotion from sex and exalting “pleasure at the expense of tenderness.” The result has been the creation of a loveless society, where, notes the author sagely, “marriage is imagined as a contract for self-realization and sex a consumption good.”

Intelligent, thoughtful and well-researched, Friedland’s book is not only a love letter to Rome, but also to his daughters and the members of their generation, for whose personal happiness he fears.

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Geiger, Roger L. Princeton Univ. (584 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 9, 2014 978-0-691-14939-4

Geiger (Higher Education/Penn State Univ.; Tapping the Riches of Science: Universities and the Promise of Economic Growth, 2007, etc.) offers an encyclopedic history of American colleges and universities, ending as the United States entered World War II. Although anecdotes and brief case studies punctuate this thick book, Geiger goes broad rather than deep. The twelve chapters unfold mostly chronologically, starting with the opening of Harvard College in 1636 (other sections include “Colonial Colleges, 1740-1780,” “The Low State of the Colleges, 1800-1820,” “Land Grant Colleges and the Practical Arts” and so on). For about 250 years, the saga features almost exclusively white males from well-to-do families. Women barely figure in the chronology until Page 400, at which point Geiger treats their plight, and eventual advancement, in a fascinating but frustratingly brief section. Racial and ethnic minorities are almost entirely absent. The lack of such narratives aside, Geiger ably parses the influences of general society on institutions of higher learning and vice versa. Colleges in what became the United States began in the Colonial era, influenced by Great Britain, mostly isolated in rural areas and sending students into a pre-industrial economy. Geiger demonstrates the shift in curricula to help serve an increasingly urbanized nation with a more industrialized economy. All that might sound inevitable—even obvious—but the author shows that the inevitable did not unfold without effort. He is especially eager to explain the development of a “college culture,” the pressures that led to somewhat democratizing land-grant campuses and emergence of universities devoted to applied and theoretical research. The rise of schools within campuses to train physicians, lawyers and ministers is an additional thread that Geiger integrates into the bigger picture.

A well-researched, detailed tome probably best consumed at the rate of one chapter per day.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Eula Biss

You can’t take any shortcuts if you believe that “the personal is political”

By Alexia Nader

“The personal is political.” I was reminded of this one-time feminist slogan as I read Eula Biss’ new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation. Biss’ previous book Notes from No Man’s Land, a collection of essays, explores the way race and class, social responsibility and privilege entered into the social equations of Biss’ life as a young woman moving around American cities. On Immunity continues in this first-person vein. Biss takes us through her contemplation of whether to vaccinate her toddler son, taking up the moral issues surrounding vaccination, manifesting the original idea behind the “personal is political” dictum—that the decisions that mothers make in the home affect society at large. Over the phone, while sitting in her car after dropping her son off at summer camp, Biss explains that while contemplating her son’s vaccinations and writing the book, “one 60

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of the things that became apparent to me is that if I really believe in living with a sense of social responsibility, I was going to have to apply that belief through my son’s body.”

This gravitas pervades Biss’ description of her journey from skepticism of vaccination to championing it as a way of protecting the weakest members of our society. Conversations with other upper-middle-class mothers whom the author considers her social equivalents, 18th-century medical history sources and descriptions of consultations with her son’s doctors all move through Biss’ bunk detector. She lays bare the assumptions both she and her sources make about class privilege and paternalism and tries to sort between medical facts and ungrounded extrapolations—and this process drives her story. “I was really interested in the way that misinformation travels between people and social groups,” Biss says. “I was intrigued by the way a rumor of a particular vaccine could catch fire and travel just by word of mouth through a group of friends and could make a number of people hesitant about a particular vaccine.”

Biss’ dissection and scrutiny of intimate conversations with her friends and family would seem unduly harsh if it weren’t clear that one of her major observations is that it is difficult to think about and research vaccinations scrupulously. Biss highlights the laboriousness of the process of conducting her research, reinforcing a point that the amount of time and effort required to make an informed decision about vaccinating is too burdensome for most people. Biss admits that if thinking about vaccination weren’t her job as a writer, “it would have been easy to have paused in the haze of misinformation and allowed that to be what informed my decision.” |

Even with the best of intentions, comparing friends who refuse to vaccinate their children to vampires of the social body (after a few metaphorical steps) is a brave thing to do. Biss admits that she was nervous about some of her friends reading her book but also mentioned that she was surprised to find that even friends who disagreed with her about vaccination have reacted positively to the book. She points out with a proud note that one friend who was previously against vaccinating her kids even changed her mind after reading it. “I don’t think we’re in a culture that encourages people to change their minds,” she says, “and I changed my mind in the course of writing the book too, so it was exciting to me to see another person going through a change instead of digging deeper into their stance.”

Biss is not shy in On Immunity about advancing her arguments, yet her tool of choice is not didactic language but poetry. She wields a variety of metaphors to widen the discussion about vaccination from individual experience to parents at large—vaccinators as vampires, vaccination as an act of war, for example. Biss constantly tests those ideas, teasing out their problems and capabilities. I called her book an “ecosystem of metaphors,” and she seemed delighted. “I love the idea of an ecosystem of metaphors because it did happen that the metaphors started talking to each other and coexisting in interesting ways,” she says. The trickiest metaphors for Biss to render were related to vampires. She first came upon one while reading 19th-century vaccination pamphlets, in which vaccinators were portrayed as vampires. Biss brings up the metaphor several times in her story, probing it in new ways based on the information she gathers about vaccination. By the end of the book, it has reversed. “The vampire, and this is really only suggested not overtly stated, has become the person who refuses to be vaccinated,” Biss explains. “That is the person who is feeding off the social body and has a predatory relationship to other people’s bodies.”

One thing On Immunity imparts is that writing in a way that fully embraces the “personal is political” requires taking no shortcuts. Biss’ discussions are both original and complex, which means that her readers must be up to the challenge of staying along with her for the journey. In this way, she is similar to Susan Sontag, whose works Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors inspired Biss. Yet Biss’ attitude is quite different from Sontag’s. As a key hidden influ-

ence, Biss lists Voltaire’s Candide, whose subtitle, Biss points out, is Or Optimism. “I felt that my book was an argument for a certain kind of optimism, for us to be optimistic about our fellow humans. And I think that’s not necessarily a popular stance, especially for people who consider themselves well-informed.”

Even for the readers who remain skeptical of vaccination, there’s a reward at the end of Biss’ book, a lovely metaphor of our bodies as a garden within the garden that is the social body. You sense that Biss has been cultivating its rhetorical and emotional impact from Page 1.

Alexia Nader is a writer in San Francisco and a senior editor of the Brooklyn Quarterly.

On Immunity received a starred review in the BEA/ ALA Issue, published with the May 15, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

On Immunity An Inoculation Biss, Eula Graywolf (192 pp.) $24.00 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-55597-689-7 |

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“Deep issues concerning our place in nature addressed with grace and enthusiasm.” from the hunt for the golden mole

EMPIRE’S CROSSROADS A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day

Gibson, Carrie Atlantic Monthly (448 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-2614-6 978-0-8021-9235-6 e-book

How 500 years of European rule in the Caribbean helped determine the patterns of “human malfeasance” repeated globally to the present day.

In an ambitious work bringing together fragmented histories of more than 20 different islands across an area of 3,000 miles, journalist Gibson, a scholar of the Spanish Caribbean trained at Cambridge University, finds in the unifying theme of a colonial heritage the sobering legacy of exploitation, greed and inequality. A drive for “grain, gold and God” seized the first Portuguese explorers, while Christopher Columbus, infused in the work of Marco Polo, was so certain that he could navigate a passage to the East that when he landed at “San Salvador,” he was sure he had struck Polo’s Cipango—Japan. Yet this was not a land of Oriental splendor but rather islands occupied by humble indigenous peoples; nonetheless, “desire would triumph over reason,” which became a recurrent theme for hundreds of years. Sugar production—rendered profitable by the Portuguese and Genoese on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries—was quickly established in these new colonies of the West Indies, along with tobacco, salt, coffee, cacao and, later, cotton. The distinctive and organized indigenous people were enslaved, killed by new diseases or converted, and new plants and animals were introduced, including farm animals, grapes and wheat (in addition to all manner of insects and microbes).

A globalized factory system was thus put into place on Hispaniola, Cuba, Barbados and elsewhere, and the use of indentured servants was discarded in favor of African slaves. The hunger for luxury goods created a “growing global commodity chain” that would define the region, spurring world warfare and revolution once inequality between the haves and have-nots grew unsustainable. Bolstered by her travel experiences in St. Martin, Trinidad, Guyana and other places, Gibson delivers a useful, manageable history of the region.

Judicious chronicles of individual islands (Haiti, Cuba) emerge from a larger, bleak picture of an “invented paradise.”

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THE HUNT FOR THE GOLDEN MOLE All Creatures Great & Small and Why They Matter Girling, Richard Counterpoint (312 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-61902-450-2

When award-winning British environmental journalist Girling (Greed, 2009, etc.) read an entry in Mammal Species of the World that described “an entire species ‘known only from a partially completed specimen in an owl-pellet,’ ” he decided that the discovery of this improbable species, the Somali golden mole, would make a good story. He was right.

Rightfully concerned about predictions that “[a] fifth of all the world’s vertebrates...were facing extinction,” the author examined a list of endangered species. He was surprised to learn about a species he had never before heard of, which was first discovered in 1964 by a professor at the University of Florence who made the discovery while on a trip to Somalia, discovering the fragmentary remains of the mole in a disused oven inhabited by owls. Efforts to find indications of other members of the species failed. Girling explains his surprise that this singular, incomplete specimen of a lowly mole deserved a place on an endangered-species list along with the rhinoceros, whose fate is threatened by the illegal trade in horns. He ponders the broader issues of conservation—e.g., whether saving some species should be prioritized and the desire to strike a balance between the needs of impoverished African villagers and preserving the wilderness. “For far too long,” he writes, “the natural and human worlds have been perceived as warring entities whose interests are irreconcilable.” Is it reasonable to worry about the fate of an obscure mole? In the course of writing the book, Girling uncovered a more important truth: It is not the endangerment of particular species that is important, but the whole, “complex webs of inter-dependent relationship that we call ecosystems.” Ultimately, “[i]n its very obscurity the mole stands as a symbol for the whole unsung, unheard-of majority of mammalian life.”

Deep issues concerning our place in nature addressed with grace and enthusiasm.

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A CONSERVATIVE AND COMPASSIONATE APPROACH TO IMMIGRATION REFORM Perspectives from a Former US Attorney General

TOP DOG The Story of Marine Hero Lucca Goodavage, Maria Dutton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 23, 2014 978-0-525-95436-1

Gonzales, Alberto R.; Strange, David N. Texas Tech Univ. Press (224 pp.) $34.95 | Nov. 3, 2014 978-0-89672-896-7

Former Attorney General Gonzales (Dean/Belmont Univ. College of Law) and immigration lawyer Strange propose a bipartisan approach to resolving the current impasse regarding illegal immigration.

Reviewing the complexity of current law—e.g., quotas based on family and employment status and country of origin—the authors reject proposals for “instant citizenship for the majority of the millions of undocumented immigrants” on the one hand and their across-the-board removal on the other.

Furthermore, any piecemeal approach is bound to fail, they write; it is necessary to put everything on the table in order to achieve a workable political compromise between the different stakeholders. “For example,” write the authors, “a hardliner on border security may be willing to support a pathway to lawful status for children brought here unlawfully by their parents if he sees an effective plan to provide more resources to the border.” The authors advocate for an overhaul of the Immigration and Nationality Act and a revision of the visa system. Gonzales and Strange propose the establishment of a third avenue between deportation and citizenship that would provide presently undocumented immigrants permanent residence, providing they do not owe back taxes and do not have criminal records. The authors would also allow young people brought here illegally by their parents the opportunity to achieve a high school diploma. Support for those who wish to pursue a college education or enroll in the military should be available. Underlying such practical considerations is the recognition that most immigrants come to America in the hope of achieving a better life for themselves and their families rather than a desire to flout the law.

Though unlikely to interest general readers, this is a valuable reminder of the role of immigrants in creating the economic and cultural strength of America and a practical guidebook that provides a basis for a comprehensive “national dialogue.”

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In this follow-up to Soldier Dogs: The Untold Story of America’s Canine Heroes (2012), Goodavage gives the Marines and their canine companions equal billing.

The story begins with Marine dog handlers spending months learning about “off-leash dog handling,” a specialty of the Israeli military. The dogs would be employed to detect the IEDs being used against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The combination of a trained dog handler’s ability to spot potential danger areas on the ground and the dog’s prowess at sniffing explosives would prove to be formidable defense against these homemade bombs,” writes the author. The Marines and their dogs would be embedded with infantry, and due to the danger of their mission, the demands on man and dog were huge. Most important was the establishment of a trusting bond between them; any misstep or miscommunication by either could lead to a deadly explosion. The heroes of the story are Lucca, a German shepherd and Belgian Malinois mix who had been born in the Netherlands, and his two handlers. Petting, grooming, feeding, play “and just hanging out” comprised the routine in the months during which handlers and dogs developed a durable bond. An extended training period was necessary since the animals would be “follow[ing] their noses far more independently than leashed dogs.” Lucca’s first trainer and handler was Marine Staff Sgt. Chris Willingham. When his two re-enlistments were completed, Lucca was reassigned to Cpl. Juan “Rod” Rodriguez.

After a grievous injury that left him with only three legs, Lucca was released from military service but found a loving home with his first handler. “Over her career,” writes the author in this straightforward account, “she had protected untold numbers of soldiers and marines on four hundred missions with no injuries other than her own.” Lucca was awarded two Purple Hearts for her bravery in action.

A sentimental tale of man and dog and their heroism under fire.

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MEET PARIS OYSTER A Love Affair with the Perfect Food Guiliano, Mireille Grand Central Life & Style (160 pp.) $20.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4555-2408-2

Another instructive fantasy of French luxury lifestyles from former Veuve Clicquot CEO and best-selling author Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Facelifts, 2013, etc.).

“Where else do you find people excited to rapture over slurping slippery gross-looking chunks of flesh down their gullets? Ummm... delicieux.” In this slender book, Guiliano sets out to convince readers that Paris is the international center for oyster lovers, and her narrative is rather like a whirlwind specialty tour. She manages to make her own nationality seem like an affectation by salting her already French-influenced prose with often clichéd French words and phrases and inconsistent replacements of “the” with “zee.”

This book is not likely to please fans of good travel and food literature, but for the author’s fans, and for a light first introduction to the world of oyster consumption and the oyster’s place in French culture, it may be a pleasant choice. Guiliano circles around a tiny and excellent oyster restaurant in Paris, the Huitrerie Regis, and its predictably charming and temperamental owner, making them the stepping-off point for the rest of her material. The author provides some solid information about oysters embedded in scattershot anecdotes. Throughout the book, she devotes sections to oysters’ nutritional value, a brief history, the many varieties and their characteristics, how to open them, eat them and evaluate them, the condiments and wines that go best with them, the oyster growers of France, the first oyster experiences of her friends and even a few glances at the oysters of other nations. Her preference is very much for the freshest possible raw oysters, but as in her previous books, she includes a nice selection of French, American and Italian recipes in the penultimate chapter.

A somewhat fluffy and affected introduction to mostly French oyster consumption.

CAPTIVE PARADISE A History of Hawaii Haley, James L. St. Martin’s (448 pp.) $29.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-312-60065-5

Revisionist, evenhanded look at Hawaiian dynastic tenacity against ceaseless challenges by larger imperialist powers.

The United States’ annexation of Hawaii in 1898 was not quite a clearcut, naked act of economic and military rapacity; it required decades of collusion in the Americanization of this highly strategic Pacific archipelago. Novelist and historian Haley (The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836-1986, 2013, etc.) presents 64

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a nuanced history that first takes into account the complex and oppressive relationship between the chiefs and the kanaka, the people of the land, in an enormously stratified society that was controlled by a system of kapu (“set apart, holy, forbidden”). Arriving in 1778, Capt. James Cook, declaring the islands the Sandwich Islands, recognized the culture as Polynesian, and while their iron and white skins rendered the English sailors godlike in the eyes of the natives, familiarity bred contempt (the native women avidly mated with these otherworldy men yet the venereal diseases’ spread might have originated from previous contact with Japanese sailors and others), and in a melee, Cook was overwhelmed and stabbed to death. With the help of American weapons, King Kamehameha became undisputed chief of the islands, creating central authority and wealth. However, the allure of the islands attracted Russian, British, French and American vessels as a Pacific crossroads in which exotic fruits like pineapple from the Philippines were introduced, as well as the inevitable “resource extraction” begun in the form of the harvesting of sandalwood trees by American entrepreneurs. The efforts by Christian missionaries and American advisers, the destruction of the kapu system by Queen Ka’ahumanu and the addiction to luxury items (sugar) by the chiefly class all helped undermine the native culture. Haley underscores how remarkable it was that the islands were able to withstand coercion by French, British and American forces for as long as they did.

A pertinent work of keen understanding of the complex Hawaiian story.

ESSAYS AFTER EIGHTY

Hall, Donald Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (144 pp.) $22.00 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-544-28704-4 The writing life at age 85.

In this collection of 14 autobiographical essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (Christmas at Eagle Pond, 2012, etc.) reflects on aging, death, the craft of writing and his beloved landscape of New Hampshire. Debilitated by health problems that have affected his balance and ability to walk, the author sees his life physically compromised, and “the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.” He waits for the mail; a physical therapist visits twice a week; and an assistant patiently attends to typing, computer searches and money matters. “In the past I was often advised to live in the moment,” he recalls. “Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy....” Happily, he is still able to write, although not poetry. “As I grew older,” he writes, “poetry abandoned me....

For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones.” Writing in longhand, Hall revels in revising, a process that can entail more than 80 drafts. “Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.” These essays circle back on a few memories: the illness and death of his wife, |

“A demanding, illusion-shattering book certain to receive criticism from both the scientific and the religious camps.” from waking up

the poet Jane Kenyon, which sent him into the depths of grief; childhood recollections of his visits to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where he helped his grandfather with haying; grateful portraits of the four women who tend to him: his physical therapist, assistant, housekeeper and companion; and giving up tenure “for forty joyous years of freelance writing.”

That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.” For the author, writing has been, and continues to be, his passionate revenge against diminishing.

WAKING UP A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion Harris, Sam Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-4516-3601-7

Another challenging work from the founder of Project Reason, this time an attempt to separate spirituality from religion.

Neuroscientist Harris (Lying, 2013, etc.) argues that the conventional sense of self—a feeling that there is an “I,” a center of consciousness sitting somewhere behind the eyes—is false and that spirituality consists largely of ridding oneself of this illusion. The author recognizes that the term “spirituality” comes with loaded meanings, but here he uses it to refer to the transcendence of self. Early on, Harris describes his book as “a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the sense of self we call ‘I’...my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion.” The author’s many narrative strands intertwine throughout the book. The memoir portions tell of his explorations into Eastern meditation practices and of his experiences with psychedelic drugs. His how-to-meditate directions are simple and straightforward (for further guidance, readers are directed to his website), and his experiments with consciousness-altering drugs are both revealing and startling.

Most challenging are the chapters on the brain and the nature of consciousness. Since the author is primarily a philosopher and a scientist, not a lifestyle counselor, readers expecting a user-friendly how-to manual on becoming more spiritual will no doubt be perplexed and disappointed, but they will come away having been warned about unethical gurus and bad drugs. Only the chapter on near-death experiences, which deftly slices and dices Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012), is out of place, reading rather like a book review that Harris has been seeking to get published.

A demanding, illusion-shattering book certain to receive criticism from both the scientific and the religious camps.

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CATHEDRAL An Illness and a Healing Henderson, Bill Pushcart (160 pp.) $22.00 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-1-88-888975-8

One man’s quest to build a small stone cathedral despite the odds.

Influenced by a visit as a young man to the Chartres Cathedral in France, years later, Pushcart Prize series founding editor Henderson (All My Dogs: A Life, 2011, etc.) decided to build his own cathedral as an act of spirituality and to honor friends and family members. Using native stone from the surrounding Maine woods, he wanted to build his cathedral by hand, “on a hill overlooking the sea. I would do this by myself over a long time. I imagined there was no rush. Indeed the idea of rush was anathema to me. Rush was what I had come to this Maine hill to escape.” Blending picturesque details of the Maine countryside with thoughts on the local villagers, God and Christianity, Henderson leads readers through the meditative process of finding and laying his “saint” stones, each one ascribed to a particular person. Although he knew the building process would be labor-intensive and slow, what he didn’t anticipate was being hindered by summers that were too rainy and cool and a cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, time both sped up and stood still, and Henderson’s half-built cathedral remained untouched as its builder underwent surgery and the slow process of recovery. “Hope and despair alternated through that summer,” writes the author. “About the cathedral, I had thought little...let it crumble into ruins.” But despite these moments of anguish, as his strength returned, Henderson persevered. His short musings on the vagaries of life, love, faith, family, friends and death give readers moments of pure joy to ponder, and the author’s determination to finish his project, despite the circumstances, will cause them to cheer.

A brief, lyrical exploration of the author’s construction of a personal sacred space, one stone at a time.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE GLOBAL TERRORIST THREAT From 9/11 to Osama Bin Laden’s Death

Hoffman, Bruce; Reinares, Fernando—Eds. Columbia Univ. (704 pp.) $45.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-231-16898-4 The world’s leading scholars of terrorism investigate the organizational structures and operational links of Islamist terrorist movements around the globe.

The jihadist ecosystem since 9/11, write Hoffman (Security Studies/Georgetown Univ.; Inside Terrorism, 1998) and Reinares (Political Science and Security Studies/Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), has been a “a dynamically heterogeneous collection of kirkus.com

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both radicalized individuals and functioning terrorist organizations...but the al-Qaeda senior leadership nonetheless appeared to have had a direct hand in the most important and potentially high-payoff operations.” With contributions from 25 researchers, this richly annotated, scholarly compilation analyzes two dozen attacks and attempts in the West and the Muslim world, from highly successful bombings to plots derailed before they posed a major threat. In Europe, write Peter R. Neumann and Ryan Evans, there is “a milieu in which ostensibly nonviolent groups...provided entry points into organized jihadist structures...even if [al-Qaida’s] leadership played no active role in facilitating such links.” Meanwhile, in Australia, writes Sally Neighbour, “an independent cohort of Australian citizens, most of them locally born and raised, had formed a group of their own and conspired to launch an attack on Australian soil.” Even before the rise of ISIS, the situation in Iraq was most fluid and concerning; the local al-Qaida affiliate had a history of feuding with headquarters in Pakistan and was seen as “an ideologically incoherent and...operationally decentralized movement that is capable of plotting terrorist attacks but seems incapable of exerting significant command and control,” according to Mohammed M. Hafez. Throughout, the contributors stress the importance of identifying and eliminating al-Qaida’s “middle managers,” who motivate and finance otherwise isolated cells, and argue that when these vital connections are cut, the farflung groups descend into confusion and infighting.

While events since the death of bin Laden have complicated the picture, this book serves as a useful starting point for readers who wish to understand how to unravel and defuse terrorist threats.

PALESTINE SPEAKS Narratives of Life Under Occupation

Hoke, Mateo; Malek, Cate—Eds. McSweeney’s/Voice of Witness (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-940450-24-7 An oral history of life in Gaza and the West Bank, obtained through interviews conducted over a period of nearly four years, lets a diversity of Palestinians speak their minds about their situations.

Hoke (English/Bethlehem Univ.) and Malek are journalists with Voice of Witness, a nonprofit organization dedicated to examining human crises around the world. With the aid of translators and transcribers, they recorded the voices of 50 interviewees and then edited the transcripts for clarity. Of the 16 people selected to tell their stories here, only two are Israelis, for the object is not to provide balance but to illustrate what life is like for Palestinians. Male and female, young and middleaged, educated or not, mostly but not all middle class, these Palestinians narrate their experiences growing up and living next to Israelis or in areas where Israel controls major aspects of their lives. Some took part in the Intifadas, some spent time 66

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in prison, and some lived for years outside Palestine and then chose to move there. Some are resigned to the restrictions of their lives, while some are hopeful of a brighter future. About 50 pages of appendices give context to their personal stories.

The first, “Timeline of Modern Palestine,” opens with the date 8000 B.C. and ends with 2014 but has no mention of the events of that explosive summer. Appendix III is an essay on Palestine and international law by Allegra Pacheco, the wife of one of the Palestinian interviewees, and Appendix IV is a piece by journalist Nicolas Pelham on the Gaza tunnels that focuses on their economic importance to Hamas. The oral histories that make up the bulk of the book paint a harsh picture of Israeli restrictions on the lives of Palestinians; however, failure of the lengthy appendices to discuss the necessity for such restriction—suicide bombers, rocket attacks, Hamas’ stated goal of the destruction of Israel—is a serious flaw.

A sympathetic view of Palestinians not to be mistaken for objective reporting.

SEX ON EARTH A Celebration of Animal Reproduction Howard, Jules Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-4081-9341-9

Not everything you wanted to know about sex, but a fair compendium of the varieties of sexual behavior exhibited by all creatures, great and small.

Indignant at the media’s twice-told tales of spider cannibalism, whale penis sizes or zoo pandas’ sex problems, zoologist and nature writer Howard set out to tell it like it is. Sex has been around for eons; fossils provide evidence of its evolutionary importance. Readers may not remember all the details, but some things will stick—e.g., mallards’ “coercive copulation,” which involves the drake’s corkscrew–shaped penis inserted into the female’s counter-corkscrew-shaped vagina, which has side pockets to trap his unwanted sperm. She can widen the path to admit sperm from high-quality drakes, which she rates by the yellowness of their beaks, a sign of a healthy immune system. Then there’s the toilet brush–shaped dragonfly organ, used to expunge a competitor’s sperm, the slime trail that lures a slug to its mate and the mate-guarding of male mites. Reptilian behavior includes precoital iguana masturbation, thought to prep the male so as not to waste time with the female and risk attack by rivals or predators. But masturbation for pleasure is common, writes Howard, as is homosexuality, bisexuality (bonobos), and even necrophilia and child sexual abuse. The author’s survey includes conservators’ work to preserve species, such as a rare spider threatened by habitat loss.

While the information is always interesting, the text reads like a set of essays without an organizing principle. There’s also a bit too much gushing and self-consciousness, as, for example, when Howard vents frustration at not catching a species in the act. |

THE TERRIBLE AND WONDERFUL REASONS WHY I RUN LONG DISTANCES

He also admits to romanticism in a chapter about monogamy and love apparent in some birds and mammals. However, he is adamant that we just don’t know enough about humans to declare what is the norm.

Howard demonstrates that there is much to appreciate about the rites and rituals that govern the when, where and how of species perpetuation.

MR. HOCKEY My Story

Howe, Gordie Putnam (320 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-399-17291-5 A legendary hockey star, now 86, reviews his storied and stellar career.

In the acknowledgements, Howe thanks Paul Haavardsrud, a Canadian journalist, “who helped to take the thoughts in my head and put them down on paper,” but only Howe’s name appears on the cover and title page. No assist for Haavardsrud?

Regardless, this memoir is fairly conventional, beginning (after an introduction) with his birth in 1928 and proceeding chronologically.

(The author appends some celebratory words from his children.)

Occasionally, he pauses to comment about various hockey-related issues—hockey violence, the late-career discovery that the Detroit Red Wings (long his hockey home) had lied to him about his salary (they had assured him he was the highest paid player, but he was not), injuries (he had over 300 facial stitches), the sad economic situation in today’s Detroit, and the vast differences in salaries between his day and ours. But the most interesting sections deal with his discovery of the game, his long devotion to it and his many achievements, listed at the end. Howe has kind words for his successors as the premier hockey stars: Bobby Orr (who wrote the somewhat fawning foreword) and Wayne Gretzky, whom Howe met when the Great One was only 11. Howe also writes with great fondness about his family—his parents, his wife, Colleen (who died in 2009), and his children (his two sons were hockey stars in their own rights). He greatly enjoyed his time playing on the same team with his sons and even won the World Hockey Association MVP award in their first year together in Houston. The author intersperses portions of personal letters he sent to and received from family members.

Lots of action, a bit of rumination and few regrets in this unremarkable work by a most remarkable athlete.

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Inman, Matthew Andrews McMeel (148 pp.) $16.99 paper | Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-4494-5995-6

A short, laugh-out-loud graphic book about the promises and perils of exercise.

The hilarious and the profound are often only inches apart, and Inman (Why Grizzly Bears Should Wear Underpants, 2013, etc.) consistently nails the space between them. Better known as The Oatmeal, the author’s irreverent and peculiar webcomics resonate with millions of cult followers who identify with his self-deprecating musings on life. Part confessional, part commentary, the book has enough humor and satire to qualify as comedy but also just enough honesty to strike resonance and possibly even provide inspiration. Why does Inman run? He likes to eat junk food. Running helps with his depression. It helps him keep ahead of both his personal demons and The Blerch, a pudgy little cherub who follows him around and “represents all forms of gluttony, apathy and indifference” that continually vex him. Inman’s caricatures of his own inner battles will be vaguely familiar to most. While running, for example, the Blerch floats behind him, offering nonstop suggestions: “Slow down, Captain SpeedyPants! Let’s go home! We’ve got gravy to eat and naps to conquer. Also, the Robocop trilogy on Netflix isn’t gonna watch itself.” Inman’s witty parodies and droll cartoon illustrations deftly penetrate defenses, proving to be oddly reassuring. When an ultramarathon runner portrays himself chugging Skittles and consuming Nutella through a straw, it raises the possibility that progress— whatever the endeavor may be—is possible. Make no mistake, however: Inman is in, but not of, a fitness culture fixated on physical and nutritional perfection. He pokes fun at hypervain gym culture and scoffs at culinary purity and restraint. Exercise is simply a means to an end for him. Running temporarily dials down the volume of his fears and insecurities and keeps him from becoming a fat kid again. That appears to be reason enough to keep him pounding the pavement.

Sure to delight Inman’s fans and probably win him some new ones.

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“A highly informative and entertaining compendium of food and word facts sure to appeal to foodies and etymologists alike.” from the language of food

THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD A Linguist Reads the Menu Jurafsky, Dan Norton (304 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 15, 2014 978-0-393-24083-2

The evolution of the names and ingredients in popular foods.

Have you ever wondered why ketchup bottles have the word “tomato” on them, why you “toast” to someone’s health or why salt is used in the process of making ice cream? In this thoroughly researched book, Jurafsky (Linguistics and Computer Science/Stanford Univ.) answers these questions and many more as he explores the interconnected worlds of food and words. Combining history, geography and etymology, the author travels the world searching for the origins of ethnic dishes and provides readers with a fascinating study of how foods, and the words used to describe them, have been modified over the centuries as cuisines have been absorbed into local cultures. English, Dutch and Portuguese sailors traveled to Asia and brought back fermented fish stews and sauces that added new flavor combinations to the European diet. Spices from India and the Middle East were traded around the globe, and the New World introduced turkey, corn and avocados to the large food-trading houses in Europe. Combining history with modern computer programs to analyze data, the author examines the subtle nuances in the language used on a menu, which can help indicate whether a restaurant is expensive or not. He also studies the way negative words used in product descriptions help push consumers into thinking one brand of potato chips is far superior to another, when in fact, both brands are made from potatoes cooked in oil and covered in salt. Jurafsky also includes intriguing recipes for dishes such as a version of fish stew from 13th-century Egypt or a 1545 recipe from a Tudor cookbook called Chekyns upon soppes (“basically chicken on cinnamon toast”).

A highly informative and entertaining compendium of food and word facts sure to appeal to foodies and etymologists alike.

THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHEMICALS

Kelly, William J.; Jacobs, Chip Rare Bird Books (280 pp.) $24.95 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-940207-25-4

A scathing denunciation of how America outsourced its industrial capacity to China, a package that included catastrophic pollution.

Investigative journalists Kelly and Jacobs again team up in a hard-hitting follow-up to their 2008 environmental page-turner Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. As “self-deputized gumshoes” covering the environmental beat, the authors felt they could not 68

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ignore the ugly reality in China. As the air in LA improved, in China, a “nauseating, gray-brown cloud from an oversaturated sky” was darkening the landscape. China’s reliance on coal to fuel its industrial machine depends on coal imports from the U.S., creating a new market for the American mining industry.

In 2013, Kelly traveled to China to examine the situation, while Jacobs constructed a dossier on the real story of how the U.S. created cleaner air on the homefront by turning manufacturing plants into shopping malls that sold cheap merchandise produced in China. One of their examples is a “$200 million-plus shopping mall called the Burbank Empire Center [that] rests on the land where Lockheed’s B-1 plant used to be.” China’s adoption of an open-door policy for American manufacturers was a devil’s bargain. The authors have harsh words for the “ClintonGore pairing,” which allowed American industry to get out from under environmental regulation and benefit from cheap Chinese labor. Despite Gore’s prescient warnings, they write, they “failed to construct any backstop of ‘ecological accountability,’ especially in the world’s fastest-growing economy.” Kelly provides an on-the-ground report on the new China, which combines an across-the-board improvement in the standard of living with a quality of life made miserable by unbreathable air, polluted water and more. He finds increasing popular unrest with the situation and a central government hamstrung by corruption, struggling to deal with it.

A powerful warning that “a growing cloud of toxins aloft [are] swirling in the winds around the world” and recirculating the pollution we hoped to shed.

#NEWSFAIL Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will

Kilstein, Jamie; Kilkenny, Allison Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $22.00 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-4767-0651-1

Populist podcasters offer a manifesto on the failings of mainstream media.

Kilstein is a stand-up comedian, and Kilkenny is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Nation. As married collaborators, they launched Citizen Radio as a shoestring, listener-supported alternative to what they viewed as the omissions, distortions and false equivalencies of better-known news outlets, even those termed “liberal.” They see media in which the moderate middle has shifted to the right, since Democrats are no longer as progressive as Republicans are conservative, and news organizations commonly considered liberal have shirked their watchdog responsibilities during the Obama era. Whatever value Jon Stewart once had in exposing political hypocrisy and malfeasance, they now see him as “at best, an armchair activist’s watercooler conversation starter.” None of their views are likely to surprise anyone or convince someone who disagrees: They are pro-choice vegans who strongly supported the Occupy |

movement, think adversaries of global-warming activism are delusional at best, consider the drug war a massive resource drain (besides, alcohol is more dangerous, and most of those targeted have been black) and maintain that, for example, there are “way, way, WAY more Palestinians dying in this conflict than Israelis, probably because Israel has the second-greatest army in the world, which is really just the US Military 2.0, thanks to our billions of dollars in subsidization.” Though their analyses tend toward broadsides with occasional punch lines, they make a strong case that a greater range of voices needs to be part of the national media discussion, including theirs. “The people whose voices matter the most are also the least likely to get heard,” they write. “When you turn on the news, it’s the same rich old white people that have systematically ruined this country regurgitating the same tired, stale ideas.”

A call to action for those who don’t like the news to make their own.

LESSONS OF HOPE How to Fix Our Schools

Klein, Joel Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-226864-8 News Corp. executive vice president Klein gives an accounting of the remaking of New York City’s school system during his eight-year term as chancellor.

Trained as a lawyer and serving in President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, the author was appointed as the head of the nation’s largest school system by newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, after the state legislature voted to give the mayor full authority over city schools. Using a national network of collaborators, Klein became one of the most influential figures in American education. He was also among the most controversial figures, but he makes it clear that the mayor was in charge. On Martin Luther King Day in 2003, Bloomberg announced the reform program called “Children First,” which Klein calls “the most carefully crafted public address of his time in office.” Part of the plan included the elimination of New York City’s elected school boards, along with the district superintendents’ offices. From then on, the schools were to be run centrally. “I wanted control [of the schools],” said Bloomberg, “and I got control. And I am going to do something about it.” Klein was tasked with the restructuring of three separate but related problem areas—political, bureaucratic and educational—to benefit the children. First on his agenda was empowering school principals by freeing them from political patronage and bureaucratic obstructionism. To that end, he set up a principals’ training institute and program. Over a four-year time frame, the 1,000-page teachers’ contract was renegotiated, and curriculum changes were introduced. The author also sought to lower the dropout rate, and he notes that relations with the teachers’ union were vital to his efforts to improve the quality of education for New York City students. |

A skillful account of how Klein maneuvered between parent and teacher concerns and city politics to transform the city’s education system.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING Capitalism vs. the Climate

Klein, Naomi Simon & Schuster (576 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 16, 2014 978-1-4516-9738-4

A best-selling anti-globalization activist and author argues that surviving the climate emergency will require radical changes in how we live.

The time for marginal fixes has expired, writes Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007, etc.). We will not be saved by toothless international agreements, spurious political bargains, outlandish geoengineering environmental groups in bed with corporations or magical thinking of any kind—and surely not by deregulating the capitalist system responsible for the crisis. Carbon emissions continue to rise, and greenhouse gases dangerously accumulate as the fossil fuel industry ramps up devastating extraction. In part, Klein’s narrative is a personal story about her own awakening to and increasing engagement with the climate issue. But this always-interesting polemic is built mostly on her interviews with experts, environmentalists and activists and her colorful on-site reporting from various international meetings and conferences and particularly from worldwide pockets of resistance to corporate bullying. “Blockadia,” she calls these places, where communities have risen to oppose open-pit mining, fracking and pipelines. In them she finds hope for a grass-roots rebellion, a kind of “People’s Shock” where push back against the aggressive energy industry can be a catalyst for advancing a range of policies dear to the progressive agenda. Klein has no time for deniers of man-made global warming, but she credits right-wing ideologues with better understanding the high stakes, the vast scope of the changes necessary to meet the climate challenge.

This awareness accounts for their vigorous opposition to the activists’ docket and for the movement’s consequent loss of momentum for the past decade. The author’s journalism won’t slow down the fossil fuel companies, but it surely holds out hope for activists looking to avert a disaster, for a widespread people’s movement that, if it happens, “changes everything.”

A sharp analysis that is bound to be widely discussed, with all the usual suspects, depending on their politics, lining up to cheer or excoriate Klein.

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“Staggeringly wide in scope...this work meticulously examines the structural forces that brought down one autocratic regime and put in place another.” from stalin

STALIN Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

EMPATHY Why It Matters, and How to Get It

Kotkin, Stephen Penguin Press (960 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 10, 2014 978-1-59420-379-4

The first volume of a massive biography of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953).

Authoritative and rigorous in his farflung research and fresh assertions, Kotkin (History and International Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, 2009, etc.) fashions a life of Stalin against the enormous political upheaval in czarist Russia at the turn of the century, which gave rise to the revolutionary socialist movement fomented in Germany. The author sketches Stalin’s early development as a poor cobbler’s son in the Caucasus town of Gori: Iosif “Soso” Jughashvili evolved into a diligent young man despite parental hostilities, attending seminary in Tiflis and becoming radicalized against the prevailing imperial rot. As the old order exploded in bombs around him, he became a Bolshevik pundit, V.I. Lenin acolyte, Trotsky nemesis and disputed successor. In January 1928, Stalin’s fateful trip to Siberia to begin consolidating his land collectivization scheme would transform—disastrously, it turned out—Soviet Eurasia. Kotkin has no patience with psychological explanations for Stalin’s obsessiveness, thuggery and paranoia—e.g., being beaten as a child or his later humiliation as a rustic “Asiatic” Georgian amid the Russian elite. What Stalin did have was the devotion of his mother and a drive to better himself, despite ill health and accidents that left him with a withered arm and limping gait. Steeped in Marxism thanks to his revolutionary mentor at seminary, “Lado” Ketskhoveli, Stalin quit school, went underground and became a selfstyled “enlightener” to the workers, his political ideas solidified by the oppression of the collapsing czarist regime, frequent jailings or internal exile, and adherence to Lenin’s inexorable class war. Stalin’s elevation as Lenin’s “general secretary” in 1922 both spurred Stalin’s own personal dictatorship and aroused alarm— e.g., in Lenin’s disputed deathbed “Testament” urging Stalin’s removal.

Staggeringly wide in scope (note the 100-page bibliography), this work meticulously examines the structural forces that brought down one autocratic regime and put in place another.

Krznaric, Roman Perigee/Penguin (272 pp.) $24.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-399-17139-0

School of Life founder Krznaric (How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life, 2013, etc.) presents methods to increase a person’s ability to look at situations through another’s eyes.

Empathy, writes the author, is “an ideal that has the power both to transform our own lives and to bring about fundamental social change....Empathy can create...a revolution of human relationships.” Using scientific research and his own observations, Krznaric identifies six effective approaches that enable a person to increase his or her empathy (e.g., “Make the Imaginative Leap,” “Seek Experiential Adventures,” “Practice the Craft of Conversation”), which moves beyond being sympathetic or compassionate and into the deeper realm of truly feeling what another person experiences. Krznaric gives straightforward, helpful tips on how to develop this ability into a daily habit.

Once established as routine, one expands outward to work this new pattern into other relationships. By using techniques such as concentrated listening during conversations, imagining the world from an alternative perspective through exposure to literature, movies, art and music, and connecting via social media and other venues on hot topics such as “economic inequality, disability rights, climate change, and gender justice,” one acquires the ability to understand other people rather than just pity or feel sorry for them. The skill to truly understand someone else leads to potential change not only in the outer world, but also in a person’s inner realm, as it creates “human bonds that make life worth living.” Informative and practical, Krznaric’s techniques are easy to incorporate into daily life and provide a road map toward better rapport with both people we know and strangers on the street.

Useful advice that promotes a more contented, fulfilling lifestyle.

THREE MINUTES IN POLAND Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film

Kurtz, Glenn Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-374-27677-5

A deeply intimate, rigorously detailed study of a lost Jewish world revealed within three minutes of a home movie shot in a small Polish town in 1938.

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short 16mm film made by his grandparents Liza and David Kurtz of Flatbush, Brooklyn, on their vacation to Europe with another couple in 1938. Between their visits to Belgium and Switzerland, there is a three-minute interlude when the American tourists were ambling about a small Polish town attracting all kinds of delighted attention from the native onlookers.

The Kurtz family lore was that the grandparents (both now deceased) were visiting Liza’s hometown of Berezne, Poland.

However, as the author began to research the details of architecture and street life evident in the film—and thanks to help from Holocaust archivists in Washington—he learned that the town being filmed was not Berezne but David’s hometown of Nasielsk, residence to approximately 3,000 Jews in 1938—of whom only 80 survived the war. Gradually, the author tracked down several native Nasielskers who had recorded their stories.

After incredible detective work, he also discovered the identity of the 13-year-old boy mugging most visibly for the camera in the Kurtz film: a certain Maurice Chandler of Boca Raton, Florida, who saw most of his family perish when the Nazis invaded in September 1939. He survived the horrific ordeal of the Warsaw Ghetto and was still alive to tell the tale into his 80s. The degree of detail in this work is staggering: The closer Kurtz peered, the more he learned of a rich, vibrant world on the brink of extinction.

An exhaustive, dogged work of genealogical research.

THE NAZIS NEXT DOOR How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men

Lichtblau, Eric Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (288 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-547-66919-9

Outraged account of how the Cold War created an entree for thousands of ardent Nazis to reinvent themselves as Americans.

Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times Washington bureau investigative reporter Lichtblau (Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, 2008) writes in an urgent, pulpy style, appropriate to his shadowy tale of “America’s decades of resolute indifference to the Nazis in its backyard.” He deftly manages a rough chronological structure that demonstrates how American views on war criminals fluctuated wildly over time. Beginning with spy chief Allen Dulles’ covert 1945 meeting with the top SS general in Italy, efforts were made on behalf of wellconnected Nazis, including the CIA’s “Paperclip” program for top scientists and the “rat line” to South America maintained by anti-Semitic Catholic clergy. Many fugitives worked as anti-communist provocateurs for the CIA during the 1950s, while in the ’60s, J. Edgar Hoover “had no interest in having his agents wasting their time tracking down supposed Nazis in America.” But by the ’70s, owing to efforts by a few crusading journalists and immigration investigators, “Nazis in America were suddenly a hot topic.” The turning point was the 1979 |

establishment of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which aggressively pursued aging Nazis, like renowned scientist Arthur Rudolph, who’d overseen the V-2 rocket program. Yet with success came backlash; amazingly, the Reagan White House provided Pat Buchanan a platform to attack the investigations and Holocaust research generally.

Lichtblau builds suspense by focusing on the long-term fates of individuals like Tom Soobzokov, a power broker among New Jersey Eastern Europeans before being outed as a brutal collaborator; he pushed back aggressively against his accusers and was ultimately killed in a mysterious pipe bombing. Lichtblau utilizes obscure sources and declassified files, tenaciously circling back to a dark reality: Many of the estimated 10,000 Nazis who settled here were involved in the worst aspects of the Holocaust.

Fascinating and infuriating corrective to the American mythology of the “Good War.”

DARK MIRROR The Medieval Origins of AntiJewish Iconography Lipton, Sara Metropolitan/Henry Holt (416 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-8050-7910-4

Lipton (History/SUNY Stony Brook; Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisee, 1999) sets out to show that negative images of Jews first appeared as early as the 12th century, long before the generally accepted 15th-century beginnings.

The author’s comprehensive research took her to illuminated Bibles, books of hours, art, architecture and even a doodle on an exchequer receipt. She notes that before A.D. 1000, there was little mention of the Jewish people. The rise of the Holy Roman Empire, large-scale building projects and an explosion of artistic creativity were the initial impetus for recognition. As scholars began to explore nature and science and classify human differences, and as the church recognized Christ’s humanity, images emerged to connote good and evil personages. In the beginning, Jews were the prophets, then witnesses to the life of Christ. Judaism, as represented by Synagoga, at first was blind, indicating that Jews did not see the divinity of Christ, nor his fulfillment of the prophecies. As times changed, Synagoga was depicted as seeing but turned away—to the left, or sinister, side—to indicate that Jews refused to see. The pointed hat, scroll and beard were used to connote rank, knowledge and authority, particularly in those from the East, and the appearances of demonic features, hooked noses, shaggy beards and brutish expressions were subtle and insidious in their emergence. Even until the first half of the 13th century, clerical authorities said that Jews were indistinguishable from all others.

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“MacNiven offers a comprehensive, prodigiously researched biography of a transformative literary figure.” from “literchoor is my beat”

“LITERCHOOR IS MY BEAT” A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

With plenty of illustrations to bolster the text, Lipton has assembled remarkably detailed evidence of the growth of the anti-Jewish images found in the expansion of learning at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

THEN CAME LIFE Living With Courage, Spirit, and Gratitude After Breast Cancer

Lucas, Geralyn Gotham Books (240 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 2, 2014 978-1-59240-895-5

TV producer Lucas (Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy, 2004) explores why overcoming breast cancer is a happy event but not necessarily a happily-ever-after conclusion.

It’s been two decades since the author, preparing to undergo surgery at the age of 27 to remove a “very aggressive breast cancer,” decided that she was going to make a declaration of control over her situation. One application of bright-red lipstick later, she had rewritten the game plan for women everywhere.

That one simple act shifted the thinking—why look good for something if there’s no afterward? Lucas found herself in that afterward, occupying the space that comes after the end of the movie, the one with the happy ending and the perfect husband.

Life, of course, continued to throw challenges her way, both as consequences of the aftermath of cancer and also as the residue of everyday obstacles. Lucas had a daughter, again defying the odds that the cancer stacked against her. It was a blessing, to be sure, but then she was told that it would be nearly impossible to repeat, due to the chemotherapy’s effects on her reproductive system. Nearly impossible is not the same as impossible, however, and she soon had another child. Lucas’ success in overcoming breast cancer would give nearly anybody the sense that other, more “manageable” obstacles can also be overcome.

Different challenges—learning to parent, resolving marital difficulties—have called on her to tap into other inner resources, and she continues to handle them with a positive attitude. “I want to not only stop and smell the roses, I want to take them apart and see the beauty in every petal,” she concludes. “Each moment I am living feels especially lipstick-worthy. I can only pedal forward.”

Women inspired by the way Lucas marshaled her resources for treatment will enjoy seeing how such strength can be channeled into other challenges.

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MacNiven, Ian S. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (592 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 18, 2014 978-0-374-29939-2

The adventuresome life of a literary maverick.

James Laughlin (1914-1997) had a long career as one of the most influential publishers of the 20th century. Given $100,000 in securities on his 21st birthday—with the advice that he “use it to help people”—Laughlin, still a Harvard undergraduate, decided to devote the dividends to publishing, a venture that became the estimable New Directions. In late 1936, the anthology New Directions in Poetry and Prose featured work by Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Cocteau, e.e. cummings, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Laughlin’s mentor, Ezra Pound. Intellectually and aesthetically adventurous, Laughlin introduced or promoted writers who came to define modernism: Borges, Garcia Lorca, Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, among many others. MacNiven (Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, 1998, etc.) has drawn upon nearly 1,200 boxes of personal and professional papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library, along with sources in other archives, for this sympathetic and thorough chronicle of Laughlin’s life and business ventures. Besides publishing, Laughlin was a poet, avid skier and owner of a ski resort.

His obsession, though, was “becoming an elevating influence on American culture.” MacNiven offers vivid portraits of the irascible Pound, with whom Laughlin had a filial relationship; Laughlin’s intimate friend Thomas Merton; and poet Kenneth Rexroth, who often “played the devil’s advocate...jabbing ruthlessly wherever he suspected cant, false values, weak art.” Subject to bouts of depression, insomnia and “alternating moods of ego-driven assurance and abysmally low self-esteem,” Laughlin, at 56, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a condition his father also had. MacNiven suggests that his illness contributed to his lifelong search for a woman who would make him feel worthy and loved, resulting in troubled marriages and many infidelities.

Sensitive to Laughlin’s strengths and shortcomings, MacNiven offers a comprehensive, prodigiously researched biography of a transformative literary figure.

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THE QUEST FOR A MORAL COMPASS A Global History of Ethics

Malik, Kenan Melville House (400 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 2, 2014 978-1-61219-403-5

God is dead, says Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead, says God. Dead or not, Nietzsche is wrong, writes British neurobiologist and philosopher Malik—and so is sophist Thrasymachus, for that matter.

In a text that takes in well-known students of the topic and any number of obscurities (and even obscurantists), the author looks closely into the sticky business of ethics, both as distinct from and as adjunct to morals. In both, he approvingly quotes Alasdair MacIntyre as observing there’s a difference between humans as they are and humans as they could (and should) be. Cultures through time have differed markedly in their conceptions of the latter: The Greeks saw their gods as being “capricious, vain, vicious, and deceitful”—in short, much like us though much more powerful. Their vision of a messy, chaotic, violent world took on a more orderly mien in the worldview of Christians such as Augustine, who, Malik notes, found ways to justify slavery theologically. Malik takes care to distinguish moral universes in which humans are thought to have choice from those in which they do not, matters that feed into clashing ideologies today. Yet, as he writes, agency notwithstanding, all cultures have some notion of right and wrong, and all of us are naked, without protection, and in eminent danger of “falling off the moral tightrope that we are condemned to walk as human beings.” In a text that moves comfortably among cultures, continents and centuries, Malik delivers some of the best of what has been thought about ethical matters and some of the worst as well. Fans of Nietzsche (or perhaps of Leopold and Loeb, for that matter) won’t appreciate some of the author’s conclusions, but Malik is admirably evenhanded in considering the history of ethical thought.

An excellent survey for intermediate students of philosophy and a fine course in self-education for general readers.

WINNERS DREAM A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office McDermott, Bill with Gordon, Joanne Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-4767-6108-4

A memoir about the life and leadership methods McDermott, the recently appointed CEO of software giant SAP, employed to shape the trajectory of his career.

The author attributes his rise—from salesman to corporate management and executive leadership at the Xerox Corporation, on to higher executive positions at tech companies Siebel |

and SAP—to his family and his experience as a teenage entrepreneurial delicatessen owner on Long Island. When he added pinball machines at his deli, which helped increase sales and pay off the financing for his purchase within a year, he learned a lesson he never forgot: the importance of stretching to achieve seemingly impossible goals. The author learned the importance of teamwork from his basketball coach father, and selling his mother’s sandwiches taught him about providing customers what they wanted (“he would later call this “customer-centricity”).

His successful business model involved combining the work of sales forces, product developers and administrators to improve sales results by developing conceptual packages that empowered clients to increase their own productivity. When McDermott demanded that salespeople become “innovators,” he combined almost unreachable stretch goals with equally grandiose reward programs—e.g., family vacations in Hawaii—and teamworkenhancing education and discussion processes. He became the go-to businessman for a company requiring a major revenue boost to reverse declining sales. As he took on other projects, he set specific goals at well-staged conferences, and he organized follow-up through continuing education. In just one year, he led the Puerto Rican sales district from the bottom to the top of Xerox’s hierarchy. At SAP, sales were doubled in a year, helping to turn around the deleterious effects of the 2008 economic slump.

Much later, McDermott graduated from business school and the Wharton executive development program.

An inspiring but somewhat familiar tale of success driven by salesmanship.

MAYOR FOR A NEW AMERICA

Menino, Thomas with Beatty, Jack Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (256 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-544-30249-5

Boston’s former five-term mayor opens up about his hopes for the country, service to his city and a life well lived.

Boston’s first Italian-American mayor, ironically known as “mumbles” and renowned for putting his foot in his mouth whenever he spoke, Menino successfully led the reorganization and improvement of the city’s school system, as well as its police and fire departments. The author boasts that he was known as “the peoples’ Mayor” both because he represented them well and had also met half of them as he walked the streets of the city’s neighborhoods. With the assistance of NPR’s On Point news analyst Beatty (The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began, 2012, etc.), Menino highlights his 80 percent approval rating when he left office in January 2014, the month after the marathon bombing. That incident focused attention on the different powers of federal, state and local governments and showed Menino successfully securing cooperation from federal agencies to release the key video footage needed to hunt down the perpetrators. His continuing approach to economic inequality, “the greatest threat to kirkus.com

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“Both erudite and intimate, Metaxas invites even the scoffer to wonder.” from miracles

social hope in America,” involves similar cooperative principles.

As he notes, “cities can recharge their own economies,” but what can cities do about inequality? Menino’s hopes include a federal “second New Deal for the information age.” When he began his term, the 911 emergency response system had transformed policing, and he helped bring back foot patrols in neighborhoods. He also changed the outdated fire department work rules, which still presumed that fighting fires was the department’s only duty. The author relates how he brought investment to the city—e.g., the new high-tech district around Boston’s formerly decrepit harbor area.

A solid image of what a mayor’s job entails and of the kind of person who can do it.

MIRACLES What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life

Metaxas, Eric Dutton (336 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-525-95442-2

Biographer and cultural commentator Metaxas (Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness, 2013, etc.) addresses the concept of the miraculous in a work both intellectual and personal in approach.

Early on, the author notes that miracles “point to something beyond themselves,” (namely, God) and that “a miracle is something that really only happens in context.” Furthermore, “When God pokes into our world through the miraculous, he is communicating with us.” With these parameters in mind, Metaxas sets about the task of strengthening believers’ understanding of miracles and, if not convincing nonbelievers, at least causing such readers to seriously consider his points. He begins with an exploration of life itself, concluding that humanity’s very existence is miraculous and beyond statistical probability. Metaxas gives science its due, respecting its methods and accepting such assumptions as the Big Bang. However, he notes that the existence of life on Earth is dependent upon a complex set of variables which, seen objectively, cannot be scientifically and mathematically explained away. Metaxas goes on to discuss miracles from a Christian, biblical perspective, concluding the first half of his work with the fundamental Christian miracle, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What Metaxas does next is intriguing. He presents a number of miracle stories, but instead of drawing upon historical or famous sources, he includes only stories from individuals he knows personally. The effect is to demonstrate that a wide range of miracles—or at least unexplainable happenings—can occur even among one person’s own circle of acquaintances. These stories, ranging from healings to visions, make the concept of the miraculous more real and personal. Metaxas cannot be said to have written a definitive work, nor did he set out to do so. However, he has taken a difficult and often controversial topic and presented it with clarity.

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Both erudite and intimate, Metaxas invites even the scoffer to wonder.

SUPERSTORM Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy

Miles, Kathryn Dutton (368 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 16, 2014 978-0-525-95440-8

The strange and devastating life of Hurricane Sandy receives a fine, grim telling from Miles (English/Chatham Univ.; All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship, 2013, etc.).

Sandy was a freak storm, a shape-shifter that meteorologists just couldn’t quite put a finger on, and for that reason— her crazed and capricious behavior—it made them extremely uneasy. Miles gets the ominous, charged atmosphere right from the start. She picks out a few characters to follow through the storm—hurricane forecasters, the crew of a tall ship, the brave, crazy members of the search-and-rescue teams, the flyers in the weather-reconnaissance squads—and draws them carefully, putting readers in their shoes. She follows the storm day by day, pure energy growing into a system of organized movement, building, gathering wind and water, then unleashing her cargo with a rare full hit on Jamaica, followed by Haiti and Cuba. The level of suffering on these islands was catastrophic, and Miles maintains a small distance between their grief and the page, a bone-cracking misery that follows in the wake of a natural disaster. She provides short biographies of various hurricanes from the past, as well as a history of meteorology and its practices and the graveyard humor of the search-and-rescue teams.

The author also tries to get into the head of the tall-ship captain, who pitted a gut decision against better judgment. Eventually, Sandy reached and obliterated the New Jersey shore and hammered New York City with 30-foot waves in the harbor and a colossal storm surge. Not just a chronicle of the storm’s terrible progression, this book is also a cautionary tale; as Miles notes, more than 70 percent of mandatory-evacuation residents made the poor decision to stay at home.

A rogue storm dazzlingly caught in all its unprecedented bizarreness.

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THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life Miller, Andy Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-06-144618-4

Is there life after Dan Brown? That was the question worrying Miller (Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport, 2003), who had a midlife crisis of confidence after realizing it had been years since he had picked up anything heavier than The Da Vinci Code.

Bent on getting back into reading shape, he devised a “List of Betterment,” comprised of 50 books he “had succeeded in dodging during an otherwise fairly literate thirty-seven years on Earth.” Middlemarch, The Master and Margarita, and Moby-Dick tested his resolve but were worth the struggle; Anna Karenina, The Diary of a Nobody and The Code of the Woosters involved no struggle at all. (Neither did War and Peace, which proved as good as it is long.) Miller stuck with his 50-pages-per-day reading plan through thick and thin, suffering through Of Human Bondage, Pride and Prejudice and One Hundred Years of Solitude even if he had to drag himself to the finish line. He discovered that Patrick Hamilton is best read on a train. The author doesn’t just stay in the past; he loved Hilary Mantel and Toni Morrison and fell so hard for Michel Houellebecq that he wrote him a fan letter. Along the way, Miller remembers his bookish youth, his (kinda boring) love for rocker Julian Cope’s obscure Krautrocksampler and his unashamed lifelong affection for the late Douglas Adams. Miller also joined an insufferably egalitarian book club, which reminded him that books really are best enjoyed alone (“...[I]f all opinions carry equal weight and everyone is entitled to a wrong opinion, what is the use of being right?

The best that one can hope for is a happy medium”).

Funny and engaging throughout and, for all the author’s self-deprecation, perfectly erudite.

PRESIDENTS AND THEIR GENERALS An American History of Command in War

Moten, Matthew Belknap/Harvard Univ. (416 pp.) $39.95 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-674-05814-9

Military historian Moten (co-author: Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars, 2011, etc.), former head of the history department at West Point, traces the long struggle of presidents to assert their power over recalcitrant generals.

George Washington was adamant that as president, he was only to assert policy, not fight wars. When fear of war with the |

French caused President John Adams to put him in charge of the army again, he changed his tune, insisting that he would be subordinate, not subservient, and demanding the right to pick all his own generals, especially Alexander Hamilton. He also insisted that he would not be active until a crisis appeared, effectively turning the army over to Hamilton, who was much detested by Adams. Moten beautifully exposes the battles and the alliances between men controlling the country’s future.

Certainly, Abraham Lincoln was all over the spectrum, with his inability to get George McClellan to do much of anything offset by Ulysses Grant’s effective action. The author explains the workings of war, the effects and dangers of standing armies, and the growth of the president’s Cabinet-level military advisers. All presidents admit that war, once begun, takes on a life of its own, but generals who begin to make policy overstep their duty. Gen. Douglas MacArthur is a prime example. Harry Truman suffered his arrogance, but “when the president mistrusts or fears one of his senior commanders, that officer’s relief is already overdue.”

Moten doesn’t mince words regarding MacArthur, who went on speaking tours while still in service, “soiling his uniform and besmirching his profession with vitriol directed against his commander in chief.” The author’s opinions are precise and witty and based on comprehensive knowledge of his subject, as he clearly demonstrates how wars are lost by the arrogant and/ or incompetent.

A brilliant, fascinating picture of how wars badly begun and poorly run can affect an entire country—usually at the hands of just a few men.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE SHARK How to Solve Unsolvable Problems

Niven, David St. Martin’s (240 pp.) $24.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-250-04203-3

Niven (100 Simple Secrets series) suggests that we right the rules of the game and not let our problems command the playing field.

The crux of the issue is well-taken: “If we look to our problems first, if we let a problem define the entirety of what we do next, more likely than not we will fail.” The author advises readers to set their problems aside and seek solutions. But what does that mean? Solutions to what? Well, to problems, one imagines. If you are hunting for a solution, the problem is hovering somewhere. Niven is more on the mark, if not groundbreaking, when he warns not to become obsessed by a problem, which clearly can diminish ingenuity, and not to let problems define the terms of the contest. The book’s appeal lies in its design: a handful of anecdotal problem-based–thinking dead ends that most readers will find relatable, a summary “takeaway” with a boldfaced key sentence, and a couple of tidy, encouraging pieces of counsel on approaching problems from atypical directions. The author keeps things light and scatters plenty of kirkus.com

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“Simple, well-told stories that will interest general readers and certainly anyone contemplating a career in special operations.” from no hero

gems—e.g., “82.5 percent of us would physically hurt someone to teach him or her a lesson” or words from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: “Good taste will put you out of business.”

Too often, however, Niven fails to be convincing. Sometimes the first draft, which he abjures, is the best, the freshest; sometimes our instinct to see bad over good is the wisest move, a healthy skepticism, not “a survival instinct that has survived too long.” Nor is it always true that the “best answer...will come” when you give your problem a rest. Most irksome are the false promises: “The solution is within you”; “Imagine turning your biggest problems into an asset. You can.”

A smooth repackaging of how to think outside the box but offering little heft and nothing new.

THE FAST TIMES OF ALBERT CHAMPION From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, an Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal

Nye, Peter Joffre Prometheus Books (450 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-61614-964-2

An admiring biography of race car driver and daredevil Albert Champion (1878-1927).

Champion was unquestionably an innovator in cycling and automotive history. He created and pioneered the internal combustion engine, spark plugs (he’s the AC in AC Delco), and inflatable tires for cars and motorcycles, in turn changing and expanding the industry. His childhood curiosity and aptitude for riding a unicycle through the streets of his hometown of Paris stoked his imagination, and The Automobile, a trade publication, wrote that he was “perpetually afire with new ideas and ever reaching for further achievements...versatile, amusing, brilliant, and delightfully companionable.” Champion not only broke records at speed and endurance races throughout France and Germany, including the inaugural Tour de France in 1903, he also earned the title of “the fastest driver in America around a circular track, on two wheels or four” at the turn of the 20th century. Nye (co-author: Peak Performance Under Pressure: How to Achieve Extraordinary Results Under Difficult Circumstances, 2012, etc.) devotes more than half the book to Champion’s endurance and speed-racing careers, as well as the history of the sport until the early 1900s. The author also explores bike design but does not provide enough information about Champion’s nature or behavior outside the garage or the boardroom. The book is painstakingly detailed and researched, and the infodump eventually has an enervating effect on readers—e.g., Nye tediously lays out Paris’ topography and construction of the city, even the individual boulevards (“The neighborhood of Batignolles is shaped like a croissant sitting on the Right Bank of the Seine...”).

Champion’s numerous achievements are indeed impressive, but in this one-sided account, he’s not very intriguing, despite the author’s veneration.

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An idolizing, overlong biography for avid bike-racing fans and speed freaks only.

NO HERO The Evolution of a Navy Seal Owen, Mark Dutton (336 pp.) $27.95 | Nov. 10, 2014 978-0-525-95452-1

Following up his best-seller No Easy Day (2012), about the killing of Osama bin Laden, former Navy SEAL Owen offers some life lessons drawn from his training and service.

Owen has a fear of heights, and he’s not all that comfortable a swimmer. Nevertheless, he spent 14 years as a Navy SEAL, where swimming in darkness through icy waters and cutting yourself loose from a malfunctioning parachute are only small parts of the job description. However, the author insists that there’s nothing especially wondrous about conquering deficiencies, surviving mistakes and becoming “an asset to the team.”

Instead, SEAL success stems from a purposeful, hardworking, trained brotherhood committed to excellence. He builds each of his chapters around an especially challenging career episode: climbing a sheer rock face in the Nevada desert, traversing waist-deep snow in a bitterly cold Kabul valley pass on the way to a target, or entering an al-Qaida compound rigged to explode.

Each adventure highlights a specific theme: e.g., how to control fear: “Stay in your three-foot world”; how to handle stress and the importance of not rushing, slowing things down; how “to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” In other passages, Owen emphasizes the significance of building trust up and down the chain of command, of clear communications, of nurturing relationships to improve teamwork, of ensuring accountability, of improvising and evolving to meet the enemy’s constantly shifting tactics and techniques. Near the end of his account, he hints at the personal toll combat inflicts. The image of a kitten lapping the pool of blood from an Iraqi fighter’s shattered skull as a petrified, whimpering child looks on will certainly stay with readers, as it has with Owen. Still, he takes solace knowing he protected his mates, “obeyed the rules of engagement and never targeted innocents.”

Simple, well-told stories that will interest general readers and certainly anyone contemplating a career in special operations.

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“A good-natured, clever and informative romp through the modern culinary landscape.” from eat more better

LONE STAR NATION How Texas Will Transform America Parker, Richard Pegasus (352 pp.) $27.95 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-60598-626-5

A crisp assessment of fast-changing Texas’ recent past, present and future.

Texas may appear to be among the reddest of the red states, but according to journalist and native Texan Parker, trends that have accelerated in recent years indicate that it is not inevitable that it will remain red forever. After providing a readable if potted history of the various migrations that have defined Texas history, the author focuses on the most recent as the one that is likely to transform the state and, due to the population and economic import, the nation. “Based upon current trends, by 2050,” writes the author, “Texas will account for one-sixth of all the economic production in the United States.” This latest migration, by Parker’s reckoning the sixth to transform Texas, is radically transforming the state to its demographic core. A rural and suburban white population wary of foreigners and minorities dominates red Texas, but ongoing changes will result in a Hispanic majority that will turn Texas into a competitive “purple” state. Furthermore, Parker calls for Texans to take climate change more seriously, as the facts of drought (and the catastrophes that come with it) necessitate change lest vast swaths of the state become a water-starved desert. Despite identifying a number of concerns that can only be qualified as liberal in nature, his solution is not a leftist one; he calls for pragmatic centrism to emerge as the political solution. This mushy resolution is likely to satisfy few, but Parker writes clearly and is whipsmart in identifying problems, providing a worthy addition to the burgeoning literature on a state that will prove vital to the American future.

For Parker, as Texas goes, so will go America. It is up to readers to decide just how assured they are by this conclusion.

EAT MORE BETTER How to Make Every Bite More Delicious

Pashman, Dan Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $24.99 | Oct. 4, 2014 978-1-4516-8973-0

The creator and host of WNYC’s podcast The Sporkful develops a humorous, witty narrative delivered in the form

of a pseudo-textbook.

Pashman’s conceit of writing a textbook, complete with homework assignments, a commencement speech and diploma for Sporkful University, is a perfect delivery system for his

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comedic take on gustatory pleasure. The text is organized around such chapters as “Physical Science: Eating on Earth,” “Language Arts: Better Communication, Better Consumption,” and “Engineering: Construction as Cookery.” The author’s fake university is dedicated to eating as an education, with a goal of achieving “Perfect Deliciousness.” Pashman aims his text at eaters rather than foodies, and his amusing narrative is a refreshing response to our often too-serious culinary culture. The author encourages readers to follow Sporkful University’s motto to “masticate, ruminate and promulgate,” while pondering the important questions eaters face. Pashman examines the pros and cons of popcorn shapes, why sparkling water is neither sparkling nor water, and how to employ buffalo-wing consumption techniques designed to reduce meat and napkin waste (“Drummettes have an average meat-to-bone ratio of 0.49, while flats have an average MTBR of 0.62”). Pashman also explores the technical difficulties presented by the “sliced cucumber conundrum” (“it tends to slide out the back [of a sandwich] when confronted with bite force”) and shows how vertical plating of a grilled cheese sandwich preserves crispness. The author’s clever use of language plays a leading role throughout his wry culinary journey. Paired with the copious diagrams depicting problems eaters/students may encounter during their trek, Pashman leads readers through the “eatscape,” which he defines as “a community brought together by its members’ common passion for eating and seeking deliciousness.” The book closes with a glossary of key terms, including “semolina fulcrum,” “meat umbrella,” “face funnel,” “porklift” and “toothsinkability.”

A good-natured, clever and informative romp through the modern culinary landscape.

HOW TO KILL A UNICORN How the World’s Hottest Innovation Factory Builds Bold Ideas that Make It to Market

Payne, Mark Crown Business (288 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-8041-3873-4

How modern creativity and innovative visions can form the linchpin of a successful business venture.

For enterprises to succeed in today’s aggressive marketplace, strategic marketing and progressive sales models are key, writes Payne, president and founder of consulting group Fahrenheit 212, which has worked with such leading companies as Starbucks, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Citibank and American Express. The author shares wisdom garnered from his corporation on how any innovator, regardless of experience, can develop products and services that “change people’s lives.”

Payne directs readers toward ways they can successfully launch a new business or improve an already established one’s popularity and revenue stream by intertwining growth strategies with creativity, a philosophy Fahrenheit 212 has dubbed “Money & kirkus.com

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Magic.” Utilizing explanatory charts and graphic illustrations, the author offers professional advice on developing an effective business framework, alongside cautionary notes on avoiding the “unicorns”: proposals that brim with drawing-board potential yet sputter out when realistically positioned within the contemporary market (“It’s cool, but so what?”). As prime examples of how “two-sided thinking” (idea-building utilizing both consumer and business perspectives) comes into play, Payne explores industries mass-marketing commodities like coffee, fast food, pet food, spirits and car insurance. In all cases, creative, business-minded innovation proved a win-win situation, both companywise and in customer demand and satisfaction.

While clearly a seasoned authority on the world of corporate innovation, Payne fumbles somewhat in the effective delivery of his message. Indiscreetly folded into all of this galvanizing guidance and myth-debunking are excessive self-congratulatory mentions of Fahrenheit 212’s brainstormed achievements, winning methodologies and transformational insights, which, by the book’s midsection, create a narrative that reads more like blatant self-promotion than supportive instruction.

Useful, enlightening lessons on the rewards of innovative thinking cheerlessly diminished by counterproductive cross-promotion.

THE LAST BEACH

Pilkey, Orrin H.; Cooper, J. Andrew G. Duke Univ. (264 pp.) $19.95 paper | Nov. 21, 2014 978-0-8223-5798-8 A clarion call for a change of policy that prioritizes the preservation of beaches over property rights.

In this follow-up to The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline (2011), Pilkey (Emeritus, Geology/Duke Univ.) and Cooper (Environmental Sciences/Univ. of Ulster) warn that shoreline development is already endangering our beaches. They explain how the natural relationship between sand and ocean waves—countervailing processes of erosion and reconstruction of sand dunes and beaches—is already being hindered by sea walls and jetties constructed to protect human activity. The authors cite projections that by the year 2100, due to climate change, global sea rise will likely exceed 3 feet, and all beachfront development will stop unless it is “protected on all sides by massive seawalls.” The cost would be prohibitive for what would be a temporary fix, since the naturally flexible dynamic of resanding would be disrupted, and sand transported from other locations would deplete beaches elsewhere. “[W]aves can cause cliffs to collapse and push huge boulders around as if they were pebbles,” write the authors, “and yet beaches made up of tiny sand grains persist” because they are continually replenished by ocean deposits.

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pollution make the situation even worse—not only due to the dumping of waste material into the oceans, but by the failures of sewage facilities under flood conditions. Vehicles driven over the sand, littering, shore drilling and sand mining also cause massive problems, destroying the beaches still in place and compromising the natural shoreline ecology.

The authors deliver a message to be heeded: “We must view the beach as a sacred and resilient yet strangely fragile natural environment to be protected at all costs.”

DRUGS UNLIMITED The Web Revolution that’s Changing How the World Gets High Power, Mike Dunne/St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-250-05471-5

A comprehensive report on how the Internet has revolutionized illicit narcotic sales.

In his debut, investigative journalist Power, whose “interest in drugs stemmed from many enjoyable experiences...more than twenty years previously,” provides a grand tour of the online “research chemical” scene and its evolution from an elementary marijuana distribution operation on a fledgling online network to a lucrative global industry. In his intriguing research, the author reaches back, from the cannabis experience of an adventurous Chinese emperor around 2700 B.C. through the psychedelic period and the rise of club drugs like MDMA to the eventual governmental crackdown against recreational drugs. Power cites digital technology as the instigator spurring the game-changing effects on the drug industry, streamlining sales with point-and-click simplicity. An interview with a distinguished octogenarian chemist responsible for “Spice,” a synthetic marijuana derivative, nicely dovetails with the author’s published 2009 series on a highly controversial Ecstasy and cocaine replacement called mephedrone. Power examines the thriving underground industry of pop-up Web shops staffed by rogue chemists who circumvent federal regulation by concocting newer, legal compounds and marketing them on cloaked websites like Silk Road, a “cyberpunk dreamland” drug marketplace powered by encrypted currencies like Bitcoin. These chemicals can be inherently dangerous due to their untested performance and dubious dosages. In the foreword, Power admits that since the book was originally published in the U.K. in 2013, many of the drugs touted as readily available in the text are now illegal to buy and sell, with Silk Road now shuttered by authorities, only to reappear in a different, fully functioning incarnation. The author rejects the aggressive policing of Internet drugs and advocates for improved harm-reduction for users with proper labeling and dosage indications as the “unwinnable war on drugs” marches on.

A compelling, accessible perspective on the global e-tail drug market. |

THE ART OF NOISE Conversations with Great Songwriters

NAPOLEON A Life

Roberts, Andrew Viking (912 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-670-02532-9

Rachel, Daniel St. Martin’s Griffin (528 pp.) $21.99 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-250-05129-5

Interviews with more than two dozen leading British rock and pop songwriters.

“God Save the Noise,” declares the knowledgeable writer/musician Rachel, whose celebratory debut gathers the voices of songwriters from Ray Davies of the Kinks, whose songs of sexual ambiguity reflect a music-hall tradition, to folk musician Laura Marling, one of a handful of female singer-songwriters included here. Rachel traces the beginning of modern British pop to John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Love Me Do” (1962), and he has selected the songwriters based on their “depth, originality and imagination.” Uniformly interesting, the lengthy interviews explore every imaginable aspect of the art, from the songwriters’ beliefs and working practices to sources of inspiration to such technical matters as rhyme, harmony and melody. As Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) says, there’s “no fixed way of working,” a sentiment echoed by many of the songwriters. “I’ve found the most stuff comes out when I’m really down or I’m really feeling up,” says Andy Partridge of XTC, whose “creative highpoints were undermined by mental-health problems, addiction to prescription drugs and diminishing sales returns.” Others find songs come to them at unpredictable times. “They’re not so much songs as slices of life,” says John Lydon (Sex Pistols). “They’re stories.” Says Annie Lennox: “You just have to capture the ideas as they come.” Robin Gibb (Bee Gees) likens the search for melody to playing Scrabble: “[Y]ou’re constantly looking for seven-letter words.” The interviewees range from acclaimed artist Sting, who says he is less interested in finding a place in history for songs like “Fields of Gold” than in “getting through the show without fucking up,” to the lesser-known renegade Lee Mavers (the La’s), who hasn’t released a song in 25 years. Others include Jimmy Page, Joan Armatrading, Noel Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker, Lily Allen, Billy Bragg, Damon Albarn, Paul Weller and Johnny Marr.

A splendid treat for music aficionados. (41 b/w photos)

More books have been written with Napoleon (1769-1821) in the title than there have been days since his death, writes prolific historian and Napoleonic Institute fellow Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, 2011, etc.) in this 800-page doorstop. Entirely conventional and mostly admiring, it fills no great need, but few readers will complain.

After his early years in the backwater of Corsica, Napoleon’s influential father sent him to France at the age of 9 to learn French and be educated in an elite military academy.

An obscure officer when the revolution broke out in 1789, he left his post to spend most of those years in a complex factional struggle in Corsica, which he ultimately lost. He fled to France in 1793, a penniless but fiercely ambitious artillery captain. Six years later, already a national hero after a brilliant campaign in Italy, he engineered a coup that made him dictator. For the next 15 years, except for a brief armistice, his armies rampaged through Europe, mostly crushing opposing forces until he overreached in Spain and Russia and went down to defeat and humiliating exile. “Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment,” writes the author, “over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record.” Readers will find this book to be a long but mostly pleasant reading experience, although some will doubt that Napoleon “saved the best aspects of the Revolution, discarded the worst, and ensured that even when the Bourbons were restored they could not return to the Ancient Regime.”

Other opinionated observers—Paul Johnson, Charles Esdaile, Alan Schom—consider Napoleon a self-absorbed opportunist plagued by his incompetent economics, pugnacious foreign policy, totalitarian government and massive propaganda, but Roberts offers a solid reconsideration.

THE WEST POINT HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR

Rogers, Clifford J.; Seidule, Ty; Watson, Samuel J.—Eds. Simon & Schuster (448 pp.) $55.00 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-1-4767-8262-1

A public-private partnership between the United States Military Academy and Rowan Technology Solutions reshapes the six chapters of the academy’s History of Warfare on the Civil War to bring its specialist curriculum before a general audience. |

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“A sharp, immensely readable account of how we’ve arrived at this juncture and where matters stand as we anticipate the election of a new president.” from national insecurity

Edited by Rogers, Seidule and Watson, three current members of the academy’s history department, the volume assembles contributions from five of the country’s most distinguished historians of the Civil War: Mark E. Neely Jr., Joseph T. Glatthaar, Steven E. Woodworth, Earl J. Hess and James K. Hogue. “The Civil War was the most traumatic event in the United States Military Academy’s history,” writes Seidule in the introduction. “During the 1850s, the Academy changed from an institution that promoted nationalism to a bitterly divided school.” The book begins with Neely’s contribution on the border states and origins of the war and concludes with Hogue’s writings on Reconstruction. Glatthaar and Woodworth divide the war in the East and West between them, and Hess takes on strategy coordination and the final phases of the war. Threaded throughout the text are campaign and battle maps and an extensive collection of contemporary illustrations, including portraits, cartoons, leaflets, newspaper reproductions and posters. The 50-plus maps in the collection provide campaign overviews as well as timelines and deployment details illustrating chains of command, numbers of troops by unit and special equipment. The series about Ulysses Grant’s campaign in the West, with three maps on the Kentucky campaign, five on successive operations against Vicksburg, and two others including Chickamauga, are exemplary. Also included in the volume are full-page illustrations of significant leaders—including Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the only confirmed photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—and the uniforms of different branches of the service.

The volume provides a richness of political context as well as showing how the war was transformed from an initial defense of the Union to a war for emancipation.

NATIONAL INSECURITY American Leadership in an Age of Fear Rothkopf, David PublicAffairs (496 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 18, 2014 978-1-61039-340-9

A distinguished journalist and scholar looks at the shaping of America’s national security and foreign policy for the past decade.

We live, writes Rothkopf (Power Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead, 2012, etc.), in an age of fear in which the instant delivery of horrific images ratchets up the dread of terror attack, even as the country suffers a financial meltdown. These national emotional traumas help account for the swings in our policymaking, from the George W. Bush administration’s “overheated” response to the 9/11 attacks to the consequent temporizing of the Barack Obama administration, desperate to be seen as “un-Bush.” Bringing to bear his own government experience and decades of writing about these issues, Rothkopf sympathetically examines the two presidents and their principal 80

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advisers—he’s interviewed over 100 of them—and demonstrates how the sense of threat informed so many of their decisions during this highly charged era. Focusing evenhandedly on the personalities that transformed so much of our foreign policy and national security strategies, he considers the Bush team’s second-term makeover, the surge in Iraq, his handling of the 2008 financial crisis and the role played by national security in that year’s election. The author examines the construction of the Obama foreign policy team, the failure of Richard Holbrooke’s AfPak shop within the State Department and of George Mitchell’s efforts in the Middle East, the illusory “pivot” to Asia and “reset” with Russia, the secret outreach to Iran, and the flat-footed response to the Arab Spring, the drone war, and the widespread and largely unknown (until the Snowden disclosures) cyberwar. Rothkopf emphasizes the difficulty of properly calibrating our policy amid the zeitgeist of fear, and he makes some proposals that might allow us to better adjust.

A sharp, immensely readable account of how we’ve arrived at this juncture and where matters stand as we anticipate the election of a new president.

MY MYSTERIOUS SON A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism Russell, Dick Skyhorse Publishing (432 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-62914-487-0

A memoir about the tight bond between a father and his mentally ill son.

Until his son’s late teens, Russell (The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist, 2013, etc.) had enjoyed his relationship with Franklin, a smart, handsome, mixed-race child who was a “dreamer” and a perfectionist but showed no traits considered out of the ordinary. At 17, however, Franklin experienced his first mental breakdown. He was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia; suddenly, Russell didn’t know how to connect with his son.

With honesty and grace, the author writes of the maelstrom of feelings that surged in and around him and his son for the next 15 years as Franklin moved in and out of group homes and the hospital as his illness progressed. Some days Franklin was kind and loving, and at other times, he denied Russell was his father, lashing out with rage and frustration. When an unexpected opportunity arose to take Franklin to Africa, where the author had traveled as a young adult, father and son embarked on the trip with both anticipation and trepidation. Although Franklin’s schizophrenia manifested occasionally, the two-week trip led Russell to believe that his son’s disability might actually be evidence of something more profound, a deep connection with the spirit world. Searching for more answers, Russell and Franklin underwent numerous healings with a West African shaman and a Peruvian healer, who both confirmed Russell’s idea that Franklin was not afflicted with an illness but was undergoing |

vastly different life events than those around him. The author’s candid account of these difficult years shows his deep commitment and love toward his son and offers readers a new concept on how people with mental illnesses should be perceived.

Not all readers will be convinced, but Russell provides an earnest and eye-opening account of the possible thin line between a psychotic disorder and mysticism.

HEIRS TO FORGOTTEN KINGDOMS Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Russell, Gerard Basic (352 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-465-03056-9

Rare glimpses inside isolated pockets of ancient settlements in the Middle East, revealing fragile yet tenacious religions.

During his years in the British foreign service in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon over the course of the 2000s, peripatetic British diplomat Russell visited many of these remote peoples, studying their vibrant religions—e.g., the Ezidis of northern Iraq, who experience persecution to this day. A speaker of Arabic and Farsi, he was especially attuned to the nuances of history and sensitive to the particular vulnerabilities of each group.

Though not a scholar, he makes erudite assertions regarding these “intellectual cousins in unexpected places,” who share with us Indo-European roots and have been preserved due to their remoteness or usefulness to the reigning political forces.

Some of the religions are ancient offshoots of the three Abrahamic religions (“people of the book”) and have retained a more “pure” form. The Mandaeans of Babylonian Iraq claim descent from the son of Adam, Seth, and revere John the Baptist as the greatest prophet. The Samaritans of the West Bank, Palestine, are cherished as a lost tribe of Israel that has been “keeping to the letter” of ancient traditions that the Jews abandoned— e.g., revering Mount Gerizim as God’s sacred mountain. The descendants of those first converts by Mark the evangelist in Egypt in the first century are still thriving as Copts. The highly secretive Ezidis, though they speak the same language as the Kurds, Kurmanji, are not Kurds but share some tenets of Christianity and Islam and believe in reincarnation and the earthly manifestation of Melek Taoos, in the form of a peacock. Russell penetrates the secret workings of these religions tolerated throughout the ages by Christian or Islamic rulers, even pursuing his research to immigrant churches in Dearborn, Michigan.

A pertinent work of history and journalism. As armies again march in the Middle East, these communities are at new risk.

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THE WAY FORWARD Renewing the American Idea

Ryan, Paul Twelve (304 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 19, 2014 978-1-4555-5756-1

Wisconsin Rep. Ryan, 2012 vice presidential candidate, enjoyed better press than his 2008 counterpart. Described on the jacket as “the intellectual leader of the Republican Party,” he makes a more substantial literary debut than Sarah Palin in Going Rogue (2009), although that is a low bar.

Born in a hardworking Midwestern town where “everyone pitches in,” the author, who is the chairman of the House Budget Committee, studied economics in college, admiring conservative, free market thinkers like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand. He interned in Washington, D.C., impressed everyone and won a House seat in 1998 at the age of 28. Rising to chair the Budget Committee, Ryan’s advocacy of spending cuts and entitlement reform was frustrated by a leadership preoccupied, in Ryan’s opinion, with winning elections instead of upholding Republican principles taught by America’s Founding Fathers. Liberal only in his love of clichés, Ryan stresses that “irresponsible tax-and-spender” describes Democrats while admitting that “heartless penny-pincher” applies to some Republicans but not him. He proceeds to deliver perhaps too many examples of compassionate conservatism. Social Security, he maintains, is a noble program, but it is incompetently administered, underfunded and headed for bankruptcy.

Ryan’s criticisms are convincing, but his remedy is a cryptic melange of pay-as-you-go and privatization to avoid raising taxes (unthinkable) or cutting benefits (political suicide).

The jacket photograph of Ryan greeting voters, an American flag in the background next to a portrait of his smiling family, illustrates the book’s problem. Genuine attempts to educate readers are sabotaged by his inability, as an elected official, to upset supporters. The result reads like a typical campaign biography: stirring, patriotic, flattering to readers and warning of national crises whose solutions will antagonize only those who will never vote for him.

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“A singular mix of literary criticism and memoir from a West Point English professor who helps plebes mold the mindset that prepares future officers for war.” from no man’s land

NO MAN’S LAND Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America

Samet, Elizabeth D. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $25.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-374-22277-2

A singular mix of literary criticism and memoir from a West Point English professor who helps plebes mold the mindset that prepares future officers for war.

Samet (Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, 2007) began teaching the freshman literature course at West Point in 1997 and considers this “the most important trust I have been given in my professional life.” Throughout this book, she mediates between the universality of great literature—and popular culture in general—and the specific psychic demands placed on the military, not only in combat, but in re-entry to civilian life. In the process, she encompasses everything from the Odyssey and Shakespeare to War and Peace to Catch-22 (which she initially loved but found harder to read the more experience she had with former students dying in battle), with side excursions into baseball, boxing and motorcycle gangs. She explains how the latter arose in the aftermath of World War II, from vets who had difficulty adjusting to the routines of domesticity. She quotes one former student–turned-biker on the sensation of “being in control and out of control simultaneously. On the very razor’s edge....It’s that same...feeling that follows you everywhere in a combat zone.” The title refers to, among other things, the transition by soldiers coming home who have yet to leave the war behind—“a terrain that seems as strange as it ever was: a no man’s land peopled by ghosts yet by the living, too. War vertigo is the order of the day....” This is a book about narrative, about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, about the revisions we make when those stories no longer cohere, about endings that don’t provide resolution, let alone the cliché of closure.

Both the incisiveness and the perspective—of a civilian professor and the military students she loves and mourns— enrich readers’ appreciation for the psychological complexities of war and its aftermath.

FOR LOVE OF COUNTRY What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrifice Schultz, Howard; Chandrasekaran, Rajiv Knopf (224 pp.) $24.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-101-87445-5

An upbeat book about contemporary military veterans, the men and women of America who are “brave enough to assume the ultimate risk so that others could live.”

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Starbucks chairman and CEO Schultz (Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, 2011, etc.) and Washington Post senior correspondent and associate editor Chandrasekaran (Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, 2012, etc.) provide case studies of combat heroism and of individuals returning from recent foreign invasions who have contributed to the building of a better society in the United States. The book’s release is tied to Schultz’s initiative to hire more military veterans at Starbucks and to generally raise awareness of how surviving veterans can serve their nation in classrooms, medical facilities and other institutions. In a relentlessly optimistic narrative, which is certainly inspiring at points, Schultz and Chandrasekaran avoid almost all mention of female soldiers who are sexually assaulted, of returning veterans who murder innocent civilians, and other commonly told dark case studies. Schultz demonstrates the enthusiasm of a converted zealot—he never served in the military, had no close friends or family who had served recently, and had never spent significant time with soldiers or their family members. That changed after he visited Lewis-McChord and other military bases and sought the counsel of high-profile warriors, including former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, “one of our country’s most distinguished public servants.” The many case studies and interviews will certainly move readers who have served in the military, as well as other highly patriotic Americans. Though fervent antiwar readers will find much of the narrative overly positive and even naïve, the case studies are mostly well-reported and often feature individuals who have been unsung until now.

A rah-rah effort that will appeal to fans of military histories and those who have close contact with the courageous soldiers who put their lives on the line.

THE THIRTEENTH TURN A History of the Noose Shuler, Jack PublicAffairs (368 pp.) $28.99 | Aug. 26, 2014 978-1-61039-136-8

The potency of the noose—as device, spectacle and ritual—laid raw and bare.

Shuler (American Literature and Black Studies/Denison Univ.; Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town, 2012, etc.) makes the hangman’s knot and death by hanging transfixing but agonizing reading: the rope with its wicked cultural baggage and the act so barbaric yet so widespread and enduring. Much of the sting of this work comes from the extensive literature on the subject, which Shuler has distilled into an infusion as bitter as hemlock.

In 1940, the Tuskegee Institute wrote that a lynching “occurs when three or more people kill someone illegally and when the killers claim they were serving justice, race, or tradition.” The knots alone have a magical, talismanic power, while the spectacle of a hanging, judicial or extrajudicial, is a cruel demonstration of power, “the ritual reenactment of community values and |

norms...a grand act of education and, possibly, indoctrination.”

In the United States, it was—and is, if less pronouncedly—an indiscriminate act, claiming men, women and children of all races, creeds and persuasions, though few will protest, certainly since the witch trials, that it has also been a piece of “ ‘folk pornography’...the ‘ideal’ white woman against the ‘villainous’ black man” or, to widen the scope, that “black people must be controlled, and lynching is one way to do it.” This is trafficked ground, and Shuler does not claim it as his own, but he does cut his own path in taking readers to sites and eras in which hangings have had profound impacts—they all, ultimately, do—from the Iron Age Tollund Man to 12-year-old Hannah Ocuish during the Age of Enlightenment to small American towns and backcountry crossroads to John Brown to In Cold Blood. The author also ably explores how deeply etched the noose is to the Native American and African-American consciousnesses.

A panoramic, unforgettable rendering of “the long fade of strangulation.”

THE GREATEST SHOWS ON EARTH A History of the Circus Simon, Linda Reaktion Books (288 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 12, 2014 978-1-78023-358-1

From the Roman arena to the Pickle Family, Simon (Emerita, English/Skidmore Coll.; Coco Chanel, 2011, etc.) explores the tropes and stylings of the many-headed creature known as the circus.

When you come down to it, writes the author, the “body as spectacle is the origin of the circus.” She locates that origin, of a performer surrounded by a crowd of spectators, in the Roman arena—not in the gladiator fights or the chariot races but in the light diversion between the carnage: funambulists, tumblers, jugglers and acrobats. The performers eventually branched out, accompanied by dancing turkeys, climbing monkeys and walking dogs, to rites, festivals and fairs, gathering steam and polish as they competed with the theater and opera. As a popular pastime, they would flaunt the wild and subversive, and the clown would emerge from the itinerant troupes of bawdy characters performing pantomimes. Throughout, Simon demonstrates her understanding that circuses are mystical and complex, full of dazzle and escapism, both social and sexual—for who did not want to possess one of those fine bodies on exhibition? In a notso-surprising turn of events, the upper crust got involved, with nobles taking to the ring and leotard: “The cult of gymnastics, many critics held, was motivated not by a desire to improve health but rather by anxiety over the degeneration of the race, specifically of the wealthy and privileged.” As the author travels back and forth from the intimate one-ring European circuses to the three-ring big top, she plucks out certain elements to highlight: the grand entrances of circuses to towns or cities; the individual feats of the human cannonball, equilibrist, contortionist and stunt riders; and the grift and vulgarity that sparked |

the sanctimony of the moralists. The book also contains dozens of illuminating photographs that complement the text.

Simon brings a learned hand to this bright history of the circus, which emblazons as it preserves the magic.

ON HIS OWN TERMS A Life of Nelson Rockefeller Smith, Richard Norton Random House (880 pp.) $38.00 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-375-50580-5

Presidential library director and C-SPAN in-house historian Smith (The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1997, etc.) delivers a monumental biography of the charismatic vice president and fourterm governor of New York.

Grandson and namesake of the two most hated men in Progressive-era America, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-1979) was determined “to succeed despite his name” and to “polish the Rockefeller legacy like fine silver” through public service and the socially responsible use of the immense wealth and influence at his disposal. Rockefeller was the last of the titans of progressive Republicanism. “He had long believed that his country, like his family, must justify its riches through good works and the sharing of wealth,” writes Smith. He worked comfortably in appointed positions in Republican and Democratic administrations but ultimately “hungered for the legitimacy uniquely bestowed by the ballot box.” As governor of New York, Rockefeller advanced measures combating discrimination in various forms and engaged in a building boom, much of it financed through constitutionally dodgy bonding schemes. In national politics, however, Rockefeller ultimately proved too liberal for the Republicans, the pillar of the “eastern establishment” at a time when the party was becoming more stridently conservative. In person, Rockefeller was a force of nature—optimistic, impatient, hard-charging and strikingly virile, engaging in sex with subordinates in a way that would never be hidden or tolerated today. Ironically, his presidential hopes were scotched by his very public divorce and remarriage, along with a considerable measure of tactical ineptitude. Rockefeller’s enormously full life as a diplomat, bureaucrat, politician, businessman, and avid collector and proponent of modern art justifies the prodigious scale of this intensively researched work, presented in sturdy, confident prose with the occasional well-placed barb. The author maintains a dignified objectivity throughout, recounting events with penetrating perceptivity but refraining from intrusive editorial comment or analysis.

An overdue comprehensive biography of a giant of mid-20th-century American politics.

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“...thoughtful, eloquent and often inspiring essays.” from the encyclopedia of trouble and spaciousness

STORM SURGE Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TROUBLE AND SPACIOUSNESS

Solnit, Rebecca Trinity University Press (360 pp.) $25.95 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-59534-198-3

Sobel, Adam Harper Wave/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-06-230476-6

Sobel (Environmental Sciences and Applied Physics and Mathematics/Columbia Univ.) grapples with the “complex questions involving science, engineering, politics, and human psychology” that arose in Hurricane Sandy’s wake.

The author, who spends much of his time at Columbia studying climate and extreme weather, looks to Hurricane Sandy as a good example to help explain the scientific modeling that predicted the hurricane’s birth and path. Sandy was certainly an unusual event—in the past 150 years of keeping weather records, no hurricane has made the fast left turn she did—and Sobel wants readers to comprehend Sandy as both a specific phenomenon and within the global picture, to understand the nature of Sandy and the atmospheric forces at play, which means a considerable dip into physics, meteorology and climatology. That dip turns out to be gratifying, as the author provides a readable introduction to patterns in the global atmosphere, their changes and the influence they have on weather events. Once through this basic course, which includes forays into hurricane science, winter weather and the history of forecasting, readers will walk away with a handle on the dynamics of weather systems. Sobel uses music to help explain coherent patterns applicable to weather, and he delivers approachable discussions of the Fujiwhara effect (“Two giant entities in the atmosphere, dangerous and powerful but elemental...normally solitary, each doing its own thing, engage with each other”) and other phenomena. For tonal color, Sobel ends his examination of Sandy with a look at the Occupy movement and its role in recovery from the storm. He then shifts to a satisfying survey of updates and clarifications on the climate change front (including the vexing water-vapor issue) and the evolution of risk-management barriers and preventative measures.

An engaged and engaging examination of “what current science allows us to say (or does not) about Sandy’s relation to human-induced climate change.”

In her latest collection of previously published essays, Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me, 2014, etc.) explores troubled and troubling spaces and places that illuminate her concerns about commu-

nity and power.

How, asks the author, do individuals express their sense of connection to one another when they respond to disasters, such as hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the BP oil spill, and the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan? How do communities come together for their common good? What social and political forces create a truly civil society? Solnit’s travels have taken her around the world, including Kyoto and Fukushima, Iceland, Mexico, Detroit and New Orleans: “Wherever I went,” she writes, “I remained preoccupied with democracy and justice and popular power, with how change can be wrought in the streets and by retelling the story, with the power of stories to get things wrong as well as right...and with the beauties of light, space, and solidarity.” Traversing time as well as space, she reflects on the social activism of the 1960s and ’70s that gave rise to communes, organic farms, and queer rights and feminist movements; sometimes chaotic and unfocused, this activism, she believes, sparked later progressive changes. Solnit is a fan of peaceful revolutions, which makes her impatient with the passivity that she observed in Iceland, where people seem intimidated in the face of severe environmental problems.

Argentina, she notes, stands as a strong example of a politically engaged society uniting in protest in the face of economic disaster. Astounded by Icelandic acquiescence, Solnit urges her own contemporaries to take action on such issues as climate change, drought, urban blight, the tainting of soil by heavy metals, irresponsible oil drilling and the use of toxic dispersants.

In her 2006 commencement talk at the University of California, Solnit implored new graduates to remake the universe by changing stories of the past and reinventing stories for the future; that advice informs these thoughtful, eloquent and often inspiring essays.

ANGELS BY THE RIVER A Memoir Speth, James Gustave Chelsea Green (224 pp.) $25.00 | Oct. 17, 2014 978-1-60358-585-9

How a mainstream environmental adviser to two U.S. presidents became a radical activist arrested for chaining himself to a fence outside the White House.

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Speth—the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute—tells of his nearly idyllic boyhood in segregated Orangeburg, South Carolina, in the 1940s and 1950s, of his awakening to the evils of racism in the 1960s—he was away at Yale Law School during the infamous Orangeburg Massacre of 1968—and of his growing awareness of the power of social movements. He chronicles how he poured his youthful energy into environmental advocacy because he believed that he “had largely missed one great American struggle, civil rights, and...did not want to miss another.” The author writes modestly of his distinguished career, explaining the jobs he held and the ones he didn’t get, offers generous praise to those who taught him and helped him along the way, and gives a nod to the role played by sheer good luck. Beyond the biographical data, though, Speth is using his memoir to send a message developed in his earlier books: Red Sky at Morning, The Bridge at the Edge of the World and America the Possible. The author pulls no punches in charging that the environmental movement, working within the system, is facing failure, and he asserts that lack of leadership on the issue of climate change “is probably the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic.” In Speth’s view, the only option left is to change our political economy from one that gives top priority to profit, production and power to one that values people, place and planet.

Both a personal account of a long career dedicated to the environment and a fervent plea for major reform.

YOUR ATOMIC SELF The Invisible Elements that Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe Stager, Curt Dunne/St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-250-01884-7

An “atomic field guide to yourself ” and your surroundings.

Stager (Biology/Paul Smith’s Coll.; Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, 2011, etc.) takes us on a restless, rangy tour of the hidden connections “that physically link our bodies as well as our very thoughts and feelings to the atoms of the earth.” As he notes, this is the tween world that doesn’t get as much attention as the sub-subatomic particles or the cosmological, middle ground that the author promises will amuse, delight and enrich our appreciation of being alive. Stager also delivers what might be called a humanscale look at atoms and molecules: where they came from; what they do, particularly inside of us; and where they go and how they leave. His approach is close to what Albert Einstein called “thought experiments,” or visualizations, of a handful of atoms and molecules he has selected, around which he orbits much like an electron—busily, with diversions and multiple covalent bonds with various associations. In Stager’s hands, the atomic |

world is diverting and constantly in motion. He travels along with oxygen as it hitches a ride on the atom of iron held in hemoglobin, and he explains how your tears are only degrees of separation from long-dead seas and fluttering moths and why hydrogen is the “ancestor of all.” If you thought the reason the sky is blue is simple, think again—“The motion of the electrons relative to the nucleus generates an electromagnetic disturbance whose wavelength or color is related to the wavelength of the incoming light”—but it is a testament to Stager that you will understand that sentence by the time you reach it.

A wondrous exploration of how our interconnections are vast and abiding, past, present and future.

GOOD GRIEF! Life in a Tiny Vermont Village

Stimson, Ellen Countryman (256 pp.) $23.95 | Oct. 6, 2014 978-1-58157-255-1

The continuing adventures of a family in Vermont.

In magazine articles about the state of American families and their homes, writers will often wistfully long for a time when things were simpler—even while acknowledging that, technically, there was no such time—when families were tightly knit in the bonds they shared. It makes for a good article, but the truth is different; this sort of family exists now just as much in “the good old days.” That truth also makes for a good book, as readers of Stimson’s Mud Season (2013) can attest.

More proof arrives in her second book, which largely picks up where the first one left off. Stimson, her husband and their three children are still living in rural Vermont, dealing with all of the changes that come as children become teenagers and marriages find their patterns. It’s difficult to tell, in a satisfying way, whether Stimson’s family has an unusually high number of stories that read like heartwarming and amusing family comedy films. For example: Daughter Hannah has a new boyfriend; he’s a decade older than she is, and he’s Republican, while the family is liberal. He’s coming with Hannah to meet the family over brunch; mom also has an elaborate dinner party planned later in the day; before the brunch, mom inadvertently sets the dining room table on fire. Maybe the author’s clan doesn’t have more mishaps and amusing anecdotes than the average family, and it’s simply her engaging writing style that shapes their experiences into these well-balanced stories. Either way, it’s an enjoyable journey for readers.

Stimson’s children will be lucky in having these stories of their lives to pass down through the generations; the rest of us only get to visit for a while, but it’s a visit to remember.

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“Interviews that range from sparklers to Roman candles to skyrockets and beyond.” from bomb

THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2014

Sullivan, John Jeremiah—Ed. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (272 pp.) $14.95 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-544-30990-6

The current iteration in the venerable franchise, edited this year by essayist Sullivan (Pulphead, 2011, etc.), who contributes a thoughtful introduction on the art of the essay since it was defined by Montaigne.

This year’s collection is as eclectic as possible, considering recent trends toward the self-reverential, and most of the 21 contributions (arranged alphabetically by author) offer some valuable insights and lessons. The majority of the essays are written by players in their own stories, and several are droll and sagacious. “Marriage gives you someone to blame—for just about everything,” writes Timothy Aubry in “A Matter of Life and Death.” In her New Yorker essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” Ariel Levy writes, “Even if you are not Robinson Crusoe in a solitary fort, as a human being you walk this world by yourself.

But when you are pregnant you are never alone.” James Wood is “dismayed by the plagiarism of inheritance.” While some of the essays display dry wit, others offer moist emotion. Barry Lopez tells a harrowing tale of cruel molestation. Wells Tower brightly chronicles his visit to Burning Man with his father. Leslie Jamison describes victims of what seems to be an imaginary disease. Zadie Smith considers the rarity of true joy. Paul West presents a lighthearted piece on being introduced at a public lecture. More audacious—and only partly successful—is Lawrence Jackson’s “Slickheads,” a pulsating story of ghetto life that occasionally indulges in unrepresentative vocabulary. Self-effacing Baron Wormser writes an overwrought sketch of Willem de Kooning that recalls the passion of the late John Dos Passos. A pervading theme is loss—of faith, self, youth, life. Other contributors to this worthy and diverse assemblage are Yiyun Li, Emily Fox Gordon and the ubiquitous Dave Eggers.

Good reading on a variety of topics by an observant band of essayists.

BOMB The Author Interviews Sussler, Betsy—Ed. Soho (480 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-61695-379-9

A co-founder and editor in chief of Bomb, the quarterly devoted to artists and writers, offers a wide-ranging selection of interviews—author on author— that spans the history of the journal.

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Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Steven Millhauser, Paula Fox, Tobias Wolff and Charles Simic. But there are many more names probably unfamiliar to casual readers. The format is generally uniform: One writer asks questions; another answers; a colloquy ensues—though the focus remains on the work, usually the recent work, of the interviewee. In some cases, there is the delight in hearing from writers before they became household names. Franzen, for example, talked with Donald Antrim in 2001, the year The Corrections appeared—but before the novel took off, before the Oprah kerfuffle—and they discussed Franzen’s two earlier novels. Sometimes the writers are loquacious (both Rachel Kushner and Hari Kunzru have plenty to say), but this is occasionally due to the format of the exchange.

Some are via email; others, edited versions of live conversations.

The media affect the messages. We learn about writers’ habits (Kimiko Hahn once wrote a lot in coffee shops; Ben Marcus had to adjust to a new baby in the house; John Edgar Wideman confesses that revision sometimes comes easily). The diction ranges from nearly pretentious to appealingly humble. In the latter category, Justin Taylor and Ben Mirov end their interview with a playful word-association game. But at the center of virtually every exchange are significant discussions of writing and art in general. Lydia Davis learned early from Dick and Jane the rhythms of sentences, and Junot Diaz says, “I don’t write with any regularity or joy. I fear that it might take me another 11 years to write another book.”

Interviews that range from sparklers to Roman candles to skyrockets and beyond.

SPEED LIMITS Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left

Taylor, Mark C. Yale Univ. (400 pp.) $28.50 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-300-20647-0

A philosopher and cultural critic ponders the durability of our fast-tracked, multitasked modern world.

Taylor (Religion and Public Life/ Columbia Univ.; Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill, 2014, etc.) probes the time-crunch phenomenon as the rapid acceleration of life nears what he calls its “tipping point.” He identifies the obvious culprit, high-speed technology, which, while enhancing methods and opportunities for communication and information sharing, forces society to compress more into seemingly evaporating parcels of time. While acknowledging the influences of the Protestant Reformation, Industrial Revolution, 19th-century communication inventions (telegraph, telephone), and the evolution of currency and consumer credit as primary instigators of these contemporary changes, it’s their increasingly aggressive pace that most concerns him.

With substantiated conviction, Taylor considers whether the fragmenting cultural effects of all of this digital distraction will eventually become an irreversible trend (“the world that |

speed continues to create is unsustainable”). Emblematic of today’s accelerated lifestyle is the rise of global financial markets and enhanced human-machine interfacing technology like Google Glass, which, while ultramodern and efficient, are also major contributors to this speed-reliant conundrum. Taylor determines that we’ve become not only accustomed to—but addicted to—this time boom, yet he contends that technology can only go as far as real life will allow. He cites instances where leisure time is not even enjoyable for some without access to the “new new thing,” whether it be email, text messaging, or dipping into social media websites for the quick-fix hit of status updates and news factoids. Though he acknowledges that a collective powering-down may prove an overly ambitious goal for modern society, Taylor’s observant thought process inspires and promotes the kind of dramatic cultural change necessary to unplug and reflect.

A timely accompaniment to James Gleick’s Faster (1999), this is a stimulating cautionary report for the digital age.

THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2014

Theroux, Paul—Ed. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (336 pp.) $14.95 paper | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-544-33015-3

A lavish and often revelatory assortment of travel writings.

Adventure off the beaten track is the guiding theme of this latest collection in the long-running series, and most of the contributors deliver it on a level that will gratify both armchair travelers and the most seasoned and fearless thrill-seekers. These writers provide dispatches from all corners of the globe—from South Sudan to Paris to Brazil to Calcutta to the Adirondacks—and in most cases, they deliver refreshingly original stories, alternately humorous, nostalgic, exhilarating and horrifying. On the whole, the quality of the writing is high, with only two or three descents into bombastic machismo. Elif Batuman pursues a mysterious local kidney disorder in Croatia; Stephanie Pearson explores the lesser-known areas of Colombia; Amanda Lindhout describes her “460 Days” as a prisoner of Somali insurgents; Michael Paterniti explores an extraordinary type of cheese in an adaptation from his outstanding memoir, The Telling Room (2013); and Matthew Power, who died tragically this year, plunges into the world of “urbex,” the exploration of secret places in some of the most-visited cities of the world. Not all the essays will be to everyone’s taste, but in most cases, this is a matter of personal preference, not quality. One low point is Harrison Scott Key’s strained comedy on traveling by Greyhound, in which he finds only the caricatures he went looking for. Some pieces provide contemplative breaks in the action, including Thomas Swick’s “A Moving Experience,” which considers how unexciting travel can be. In the foreword, series editor Jason Wilson provides another fine essay about rediscovering his |

first great wine experience, and second-time editor Theroux introduces the book with thoughts on his own career of risky explorations and the pleasures of reading about the most challenging “adventures and ordeals—the traveler’s baptism of fire.”

Other contributors include A.A. Gill, David Sedaris and Colson Whitehead.

A thrilling, surprising collection—one of the best in the series.

IVAN PAVLOV A Russian Life in Science Todes, Daniel P. Oxford Univ. (848 pp.) $39.95 | Oct. 31, 2014 978-0-19-992519-3

An expansive scholarly biography of Russia’s most eminent scientist.

Todes (Institute of History of Medicine/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, 2001, etc.) traces the evolution of Ivan Pavlov’s groundbreaking discoveries in the context of Russian history over the span of his life (1849-1936). This is the culmination of a decadeslong study of the scientist, whose name is iconic in the world of behaviorist psychology but whose work, according to Todes, is misunderstood. The author establishes that, unlike American behaviorists, Pavlov never “denied the importance or even the existence of an inner, subjective world.

He also never used the term “conditioned reflex.” He used the term “conditional” to describe the salivation of dogs expecting food upon receiving a signal such as the sound of a bell. The intention of the term was to distinguish “conditional reflexes,” which might or might not occur, from automatic, unconditional responses—e.g., caused by direct contact of food with the salivary glands. By the time Pavlov embarked on his well-known work with dogs, he had already received the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to him in 1904 for his studies on digestive physiology. These involved tracing how the arousal of appetite acted to stimulate “the secretory nerves of the gastric glands” and was followed up by excitations produced when food “excites the specialized nerves in the mucous membrane of the stomach.” Politically a liberal, Pavlov welcomed the 1905 revolution, but he was not a supporter of the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, his prominence on the international stage was significant enough that he was able to pursue his research and even travel abroad.

In 1935, a year before his death, he organized and hosted the International Congress of Physiologists in Leningrad.

A comprehensive, nuanced picture of Pavlov’s life and times and his seminal contributions to science.

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“A well-documented, upbeat alternative to doom-and-gloom prognostications.” from bomb

THE DELUGE The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

Tooze, Adam Viking (640 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 13, 2014 978-0-670-02492-6

A vigorously defended argument that the war to end all wars was really the origin of a new world order and American superpower.

Taking a truly global view of World War I, Tooze (History/Yale Univ.; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, 2007, etc.) holds that the conflict was Europe’s undoing in more ways than one. Obviously, it laid the groundwork for the global war to follow, but it also announced the arrival of an America that was able to act unilaterally on the world stage. The huge bloodletting also left the losing, and even some of the victorious, powers politically unstable. The author highlights Hitler, of course, but also Leon Trotsky as representatives of a sweeping change by which the war “opened a new phase of ‘world organization.’ ” What is novel about Tooze’s thesis is that, in this light, Hitler, Mussolini and the military leaders of Imperial Japan saw themselves as rebels against this new world order, which oppressed Germany financially and dismissed Italian and Japanese claims for rewards for their parts in defeating the Central Powers; all resented the notion that the terms of the transition to this new world order were dictated by the upstart United States. Interesting, too, is the author’s interpretation of America’s artful use of soft power, favoring political and economic influence over direct military intervention whenever possible. One negative consequence was Wilson’s negotiation of a “peace without victory” at the end of the war that promoted a subsequent instability made lethal with the worldwide economic collapse a decade later. In discussing what he calls “the fiasco of Wilsonism,” Tooze sometimes drifts into highly technical economic matters such as the mechanics of hyperinflation, but his narrative is gripping—and sobering, since readers well know the tragedies that followed.

A lucid, first-rate history of the results of a war whose beginning a century ago we are busily commemorating.

BRIAN JONES The Making of the Rolling Stones

Trynka, Paul Viking (432 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 9, 2014 978-0-670-01474-3

A lively biography of the enigmatic founder of the Rolling Stones, who was dethroned and died just as the band approached its artistic peak.

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Raised in the conservative enclave of Cheltenham, Brian Jones’ (1942-1969) family life was the epitome of middle-class English repression and conformity. However, the bureaucratic culture of Cheltenham would mold Jones’ complex, roguish personality. Music journalist Trynka’s (David Bowie: Starman, 2011, etc.) portrait is that of a young man determined to get what he wanted, flaunting conventions and consequences and exhibiting little conscience as he cemented his ambition to become a professional musician. His obsession with American blues led him to London, where Jones immediately made a name for himself and soon met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through the circle of musicians that hung around impresario Alexis Korner.

It was Jones who corralled the members of the Rolling Stones, named the band after a Muddy Waters lyric, and influenced the band’s musical style by teaching Richards open G tuning, a blues staple that would define the Stones’ sound. There was no question that Jones was the Stones’ unrivaled leader. As they began charting success, they quickly became infamous for their infighting and drama, and the power struggles between Jones and the Jagger-Richards axis, often involving women, were well-documented. Eventually, Jones was dismissed, and several weeks later, he was found dead in his swimming pool, the exact details of his death still a controversy. Trynka expertly explores the paradoxes of Jones’ inner life, drawing on countless interviews of friends and fellow musicians, but there are times when the author comes across as righteously defensive of Jones, despite correcting many of the apparently erroneous claims made by Richards in his own autobiography. Occasionally, Trynka’s evidence creates a he said, she said situation that fails to definitively set the record straight. There is no disputing, however, that Jones was the mastermind of the Stones, and Trynka’s well-researched biography rightly reclaims his legacy.

An intimate portrait of the multifaceted and beguiling Jones, who forever changed popular music and culture.

ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

Vince, Gaia Milkweed (448 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-57131-357-7

Science journalist Vince chronicles a two-year journey around the globe to evaluate warnings that we face an eco-

logical tipping point.

“Deserts are spreading...forests are dying and being logged....

Wildlife is being hunted and dying because of habitat loss,” writes the author, who also notes that we currently use 30 percent more natural resources per year “than the planet can replenish.” Geologists are calling this the Anthropocene epoch due to “the changes humans are making to the biosphere.” As the author acknowledges, we are the first species “to knowingly reshape the living Earth’s biology and chemistry. We have |

become the masters of our planet and integral to the destiny of life on Earth.” Despite this dim picture, the author found grounds for optimism on her travels. Vince takes the hopeful view that we will act in a timely fashion to “preserve nature or master its tricks artificially.” In China and India, she chronicles government efforts to address atmospheric pollution and looming water shortages. Her main interest, however, is the inventiveness of people at the local level dealing with these problems.

Vince believes that they are ushering in “an extraordinary new human age...creating artificial glaciers to irrigate their crops, building artificial coral reefs to shore up islands, and artificial trees to clean the air.” The author was most impressed by the cumulative effect of small changes in heretofore-inaccessible mountain regions that now generate electricity using microhydropower; these areas have also gained access to the Internet and improved sanitation. She discusses the work of “[h]ydrologists in Peru [who are] building tunnels to drain an Andean glacial lake” as a way to control disastrous flooding. On a smaller scale in the Indian village of Ladakh, a local engineer is leading a project to convert mountain wastewater into a series of manmade miniglaciers connected to irrigation canals. Everywhere she traveled, Vince continued to see great promise in human creativity.

A well-documented, upbeat alternative to doom-andgloom prognostications.

GIVE ME LIBERTY Speakers and Speeches that Have Shaped America

Webber, Christopher L. Pegasus (464 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-633-3

Episcopal priest Webber (American to the Backbone: The Life of James W.C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists, 2011) traces America’s search for personal freedom through the men and women whose voices still demand our attention.

The author follows some of our best orators, from Patrick Henry and Daniel Webster to Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan, and he successfully shows how differently and yet how alike this struggle has been over the years. While Henry sought freedom from central government, Webster was committed to the same; they both sought personal freedom and feared too much power in any one place. The book gets a bit dry as the author moves into the abolitionists and suffragists. They fought to end slavery and create a free life for African-Americans and rallied against the death penalty and child labor along the way. The women who worked with them saw their own lack of freedom and fought for the vote and the right to own property, giving birth to the suffragist cause. The most interesting part of the book is the way Webber traces the seeds of ideas, the sources and connections as they are repeated through the years.

Abraham Lincoln asked the same questions as Webster about |

preserving the Union, and he paraphrased Webster’s words in the ending of the Gettysburg Address: “of the people, by the people....” Adlai Stevenson used Lincoln’s “house divided” in a Cold War-era speech. Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory came straight from William Jennings Bryan. All these men and women spoke of freedom as a goal for all, and each dealt with the economic factors that controlled freedom: poverty, taxes and inequality.

Mostly engaging, and Webber saves the best for last: Martin Luther King Jr.’s words and cadences moved an entire nation, and he, like the other orators, used his voice for the millions who had none.

THE HIDDEN AGENDA OF THE POLITICAL MIND How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It

Weeden, Jason; Kurzban, Robert Princeton Univ. (376 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 5, 2014 978-0-691-16111-2

An examination of how selfishness and self-deception characterize political

thinking.

Psychologists Weeden and Kurzban (Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, 2011) argue that one’s opinions on social and political issues, liberal or conservative, are shaped by self-interest. No matter the issue, they write, “policies people fight over have real-life consequences that help some people and harm others. In our view, all sides typically seek to advance their interests and are hypocritical in the way they present their views.” In support of their argument, they use data from the U.S. General Social Survey, which asks for responses on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, immigration reform, government-provided health insurance, legalization of marijuana, gun control and income equality. About a third of the book consists of appendices summarizing the results of the surveys, with respondents distinguished by race, income, religion, ethnicity, level of education and intellectual ability. All individuals, the authors assert, behave like politicians or CEOs, hiding their real motives behind “socially attractive veneers. The Public Relations Departments of people’s minds craft stories about the benevolent wisdom of their own views and the malevolent idiocy of their opponents’ views.” Admitting the limits of their analysis, the authors cannot explain why some people show concern over environmental issues, defense spending or physician-assisted suicide. What, they wonder, are the “real-life interests” that motivate them? “[W]hile we understand why news stories involving floods and storms, environmental catastrophes, or terrorist bombings are particularly attention grabbing for human minds...we don’t see how this leads to widespread, passionate conflict within society.” Selfinterest, in the authors’ view, is myopically focused on immediate needs. kirkus.com

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“Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder that the Earth is more important than a hobby.” from special deluxe

“Our view is...a deeply cynical one,” write the authors, and is “unlikely to change anything about how people argue publicly about their preferred policies.” However, this disturbing book may provoke debate, dismay and considerable anger.

SPECIAL DELUXE A Memoir of Life & Cars Young, Neil Blue Rider Press (384 pp.) $32.00 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-399-17208-3

Young (Waging Heavy Peace, 2012) returns to reflect on the two defining love affairs of his life: cars and dogs.

The author’s interest in cars dates back to when he was a young boy riding around in his family’s 1948 Monarch Business Coupe with his dog Skippy tucked away in the car’s trunk. Perhaps the reason cars made such an impression on him is that the family moved around so often, developing a sense of itinerancy that fostered a love of being on the road. Young’s many road trips, however, allow him to retroactively calculate the emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This recurring diversion awkwardly interrupts the narrative, but Young feels obliged to include it due to his eco-conscious beliefs. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: the author’s love of cars against his awareness of the ecological damage caused by fossil fuel consumption. Nevertheless, Young reveals that his interest in cars was always about their aesthetic appeal, and it was not merely limited to the newest and most streamlined vehicles. The author admits that what really caught his eye were cars with an indescribable uniqueness, which often attracted him to “clunkers.” These cars spoke to Young, holding a romantic sway over him. Among his favorites was the black hearse that functioned as the Squires’ unofficial tour bus, as well as a 1957 Corvette he purchased to reward himself after his first taste of success with Buffalo Springfield. The plaintive and straightforward approach to Young’s remembrances evokes a kindly paternalism as he candidly recounts details of his experiences forging his musical ambition in Canadian clubs, the hippie scene in Los Angeles, his later solo career and the innumerable rides that took him there. Ultimately, Young issues a warning about our dependence on fossil fuels and the resultant threat of climate change while showcasing new and efficient alternative fuel systems.

Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder that the Earth is more important than a hobby.

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children’s & teen CAUGHT UP

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Abrams, Amir Dafina/Kensington (336 pp.) $9.95 paper | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-7582-9478-4

LOVE AND OTHER THEORIES by Alexis Bass...................................93 BEETLE BUSTERS by Loree Griffin Burns; photos by Ellen Harasimowicz............................................................ 94 DREAMING IN INDIAN by Lisa Charleyboy; Mary Beth Leatherdaleó—Eds........................................................... 96 A HERO AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Erin Claiborne.............. 96 MATISSE’S GARDEN by Samantha Friedman; illus. by Cristina Amodeo....................................................................100 OUTSIDE by Deirdre Gill...................................................................100 LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD by The Brothers Grimm; illus. by Sybille Schenker; trans. by Anthea Bell ...............................102 CHERNOBYL’S WILD KINGDOM by Rebecca L. Johnson................106 THE HIDDEN DOORS by Kazu Kibuishió—Ed............................... 107 RAIN FOREST COLORS by Janet Lawler; photos by Tim Laman......................................................................... 107 WILD ROVER NO MORE by L.A. Meyer.......................................... 113 BIRD CAT DOG by Lee Nordling; illus. by Meritxell Bosch..............114

Kennedy, an African-American teen girl from a suburban gated community, lets her fascination with all things ’hood drive her into dangerous territory.

Her prim best friends, Jordan and Hope, have nothing but contempt for “low-budget hood roaches” and “stupid, annoying Ebonics.”

Kennedy, however, seeks a boy who’s swaggerlicious and has even gotten a job at the local mall’s food court in hopes of meeting boys more her style. When Sasha, Kennedy’s co-worker, starts inviting her to parties and introducing her to boys from the ’hood, Kennedy quickly finds herself drinking, smoking weed, sneaking out of her house and becoming attached to an older boy named Malik. A lifestyle that initially seems adventurous and exciting soon leads to frightening fights, controlling behavior on Malik’s part and a scare-’em-straight climax with serious consequences. Readers see some of Kennedy’s thoughts and feelings—her frustration with her mom’s and friends’ disapproval, her wonder at receiving Malik’s attention—but others remain opaque. It is never clear where Kennedy thinks Malik gets his money or even what interests her in ’hood life in the first place. Some dialogue and slang phrases feel repetitive: Sasha repeats “Miss me wit’ dat” far too often.

Sometimes rough around the edges but an engaging cautionary tale nevertheless. (Fiction. 14-18)

THE MOUSE MANSION by Karina Schaapman............................... 117

STONE COLD TOUCH

WINTER BEES & OTHER POEMS OF THE COLD by Joyce Sidman; illus. by Rick Allen.............................................................................. 118

Armentrout, Jennifer L. Harlequin Teen (448 pp.) $9.99 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-373-21134-0 Series: Dark Elements Trilogy, 2

STAR STUFF by Stephanie Roth Sisson.............................................. 118 THE EXTRAORDINARY MR. QWERTY by Karla Strambini...........119 MALALA, A BRAVE GIRL FROM PAKISTAN / IQBAL, A BRAVE BOY FROM PAKISTAN by Jeanette Winter.......................................122 IN MY HEART by Jo Witek; illus. by Christine Roussey.................... 125

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The saga of a girl who’s a hybrid of demon and Warden, the gargoyle-type creatures who fight demons, continues (White Hot Kiss, 2014).

Layla is torn between very different heartthrobs: Zayne, the Warden boy with whom she’s lived for most of her life, and Roth, the demon Crown Prince of Hell.

It’s complicated. If she kisses Zayne, her true love, she might accidentally inhale his soul. Although Roth tells her he doesn’t

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omg! it’s a sequel!

Photo courtesy Sarah Oughton

I actually squealed when I opened the box: Inside were two galleys of Prairie Fire, by E.K. Johnston. My glee stemmed from two sources. First, OMG, it’s a sequel to my favorite book of 2014! And second, it gives me a chance to talk about said favorite book one more time.

All year long, ever since last December, when I read The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim, I have had an easy answer to a sometimes-difficult question: “What do you like this year?” I’ve read plenty of great books, mind you, but for some reason, this story of the teenage dragon slayer, his indomitable hero aunt and her devoted blacksmith wife, his quietly diligent father, and above all, his friend and bard, Siobhan, has stuck with me.

I love its casually clever worldbuilding and the way narrator Siobhan E.K. Johnston helps readers understand this alternative Earth in which carbon-loving dragons are a perennial threat, made all the more dangerous by the Industrial Revolution. I love its wry Canadian humor and its affection for the fictional community of Trondheim. I love its zeal for justice and its keen understanding of geopolitics. I love Siobhan’s passion for music and her dedication to her friend. I love the fact that it’s not a romance.

I love everything about it, actually, and I am not above blatantly milking every forum given to me by Kirkus Reviews to further my agenda of ensuring that every English-speaking reader over the age of 12 reads it.

I have to admit I’m a little anxious about Prairie Fire—can I possibly love it as much as I love The Story of Owen? I’m not sure it matters, as simply knowing that the book exists makes me idiotically happy. To everyone who loves Owen and Siobhan as much as I do: OMG! There’s a sequel!

You’ll need to hang on till March 2015, but isn’t just knowing it’s on its way the best news ever? —V.S.

really care for her, he continues to attend school, wisecracking his way through every scene. The story kicks off when Layla’s snake tattoo, Bambi, eats a visiting Warden. Worse, Layla and Roth find evidence that the foretold demonic Lilin indeed has entered their high school and appears to be taking the souls of students. While she’s investigating the Lilin, Layla finally begins a real relationship with Zayne. As the plot thickens, she begins to doubt herself. Could she have some connection with the Lilin?

Armentrout balances suspense and romance, spicing it up with Roth’s one-liners and Layla’s wry inner commentary, all adding welcome humor. Of course, everyone involved has a hotness level that would shame supermodels. The almost-sex scenes provide even more punch, and the book ends with a nice zinger. Demon Roth again stands out as the character with the mostest.

Demonic fun. (Paranormal romance. 14-18)

KILLER INSTINCT

Barnes, Jennifer Lynn Hyperion (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-6832-4 978-1-4231-9512-2 e-book Series: Naturals, 2 In order to catch a serial killer, a quintet of gifted teens needs first to cooperate with one another in this sequel to The Naturals (2014).

Cassie is a member of the FBI’s Naturals program—a supersecret squad of gifted teens assigned to work cold cases.

Cassie’s a profiler; she learned at her con-artist mother’s knee to read people’s motivations and fears. Her teammates include an expert at reading emotions, someone with immense skill at both lying and detecting lies, a numbers whiz and another profiler. The serial-killer hunt that quickly entangles them all (not a cold case at all, but a live murderer they can’t avoid) is a wellconstructed and suspenseful mystery. But they’ll never be able to catch the killer if they don’t get their collective act together.

The five teens and their adult caretakers are at constant loggerheads, fighting about both romance and secrets. One of the Naturals is a serial killer’s son, the adult team members were involved in said killer’s arrest, and the current killer seems to be a copycat. As in Cassie’s previous adventure, all their gory mysteries revolve around the tragic pasts of multiple members of the Naturals team. A romance plotline, though its messy complexities are rich in verisimilitude, grates: Everybody wants a piece of Cassie.

A welcome addition to the teen-sleuth genre. (Mystery.

12-15)

Vicky Smith is the children’s & teen editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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“What looks poised to be a romantic comedy (girl meets boy; theories fail; love triumphs) turns into something far more complex and bittersweet.” from love and other theories

LOVE AND OTHER THEORIES

Bass, Alexis HarperTeen (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Dec. 31, 2014 978-0-06-227532-5 978-0-06-227534-9 e-book A system for avoiding heartbreak falls apart in an unexpectedly insightful tale of friendship and loyalty.

Aubrey’s friends spend their weekends making out with boys at parties, drinking Slurpees mixed with vodka, and hurling insults at their ex-friend, Chiffon. Now that Aubrey has gotten into her dream school and eased off her work schedule, she can join them. Just before the start of their junior year, Shelby, the de facto group leader, developed the titular theories. High school boys, according to the theories, are incapable of commitment, so girls should enjoy sex and never expect anything afterward. But when good-looking outsider Nathan Diggs shows up in Aubrey’s drama class, and Nathan and Aubrey quickly become inseparable, Aubrey is tempted to forget that she’s become “evolved.” What looks poised to be a romantic comedy (girl meets boy; theories fail; love triumphs) turns into something far more complex and bittersweet. Each character’s life is carefully imagined, from Chiffon, the target of the girls’ ridicule, to Shelby herself, whose carefree armor slowly begins to crack. The bullying is never forgiven. The lovers, once estranged, are never entirely reunited. The theories are indeed debunked, but what is left in their place is a kind of vulnerability and regret that can’t be summed up in a romantic platitude.

Careful, subtle and aching. (Fiction. 14-18)

EDIBLE COLORS

Bass, Jennifer Vogel Photos by Bass, Jennifer Vogel Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $12.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-62672-002-2 This photographic study of color introduces both widely known and unusual fruits and vegetables.

“Carrots are ORANGE. / They are also PURPLE. // Look what else can be PURPLE!” Against white backgrounds, crisp photographs are captioned with the produce’s common names.

Purple Passion asparagus, Royal Burgundy beans and a Black Velvet apricot vie for readers’ eyes on a crowded double-page spread; layouts illustrating the colors blue and black feature fewer specimens and more white space. Unusual, well-chosen examples such as the Red Dacca banana, Louisiana Long Green eggplant, and the fabulous, many-tentacled Buddha’s Hand citron challenge readers’ assumptions about familiar fruits and veggies and expand their knowledge of rarer varieties. Bass’ groupings illustrate the fact that a color’s name approximates, rather than pinpoints, its essential attributes. Thus, the Adirondack Blue and Russian Blue potatoes could easily have joined |

the purple denizens rather than reside with the blues. And the Black Beauty eggplant and Jewel black raspberries are, arguably, highly pigmented versions of the color purple. Two kale varieties—Redbor and Lacinato—are captioned as “Redbar” and “Lacinto.” Clusters and groups are sometimes pluralized (“Jersey blueberries”), sometimes not (“Latham raspberry.”) There’s no attempt to depict scale—so a Calabrese broccoli is shown about half the size of a Bartlett pear.

Quibbles aside, this volume presents appetizing produce in an engaging array. (Picture book. 2-5)

MISDIRECTED

Berman, Ali Triangle Square Books for Young Readers (288 pp.) $18.95 | Nov. 25, 2014 978-1-60980-573-9 The new kid at school comes into conflict with the administration’s faithbased agenda.

After moving from Massachusetts to Colorado with his family, Ben enrolls in a Christian high school despite his lack of a religious background. His atheism causes him to butt heads with his fellow classmates and teachers, leaving him alone and unpopular. His only friends are Tess, the pretty girl next door, and James, the pathetic son of the local drunk. Ben gives church a try, but it leaves him cold, as does the science teacher’s insistence on biblical teachings. The author crams in debates over a variety of hot topics including religious persecution, homophobia and creationism in the classroom.

Unfortunately she neglects to supply the novel with well-developed characters, a solid plot or narrative drive. This isn’t drama; it’s a Very Special Episode of a sitcom, full of dialogic set pieces that explore the issues. The characters sound less like people and more like bullet points of arguments. This would be OK if the author actually took a firm stand on any issue, but in the end, readers are left with the notion that things would be a whole lot better if we all just respected each other’s views, as if this were a sudden, revelatory concept.

A sermon with too little to say. (Fiction. 12-16)

BEAUTIFUL MOON A Child’s Prayer

Bolden, Tonya Illus. by Velasquez, Eric Abrams (32 pp.) $16.95 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4197-0792-6

A young boy’s prayer brings home to readers all the people who need prayers in our world.

Over a busy, rushing, noisy city, “The amber orb floats, / washing the night / with a radiant glow.” A small black boy spies

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“A splendid example of science controversy in everyday life.” from beetle busters

it when he hops out of bed to say his forgotten prayers, and underneath its beauty, he prays for the homeless, for an end to wars, for the sick and the hungry, and for those closest to him.

Juxtaposed with the portrait of this young innocent kneeling at his bedside, the spreads that follow are stark: a woman bundled on a park bench, her belongings next to her; a man on a commuter train thinking of his faraway soldier daughter; a man in a hospital bed wishing for sleep to come; a couple searching bare cupboards and a line at a soup kitchen. Bolden and Velasquez hint at an equation between God’s watchfulness and care with the light of the moon; in each of these mixed-media–and-oil scenes, the harvest moon shines down on all the diversity of the world and its many problems, and when the boy is snuggled back in bed, “the beautiful moon goes on its way.”

Prayer may seem like something from ancient history for many young children; this beautiful book brings prayer to the modern world and hauntingly shows just how needed it is. (Picture book/religious. 4-8)

HOW WE FALL

Brauning, Kate Merit Press (304 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 3, 2014 978-1-4405-8179-3 When Jackie falls in love with a completely inappropriate boy, she turns her back on what might have been a beautiful relationship out of fear of hurting her family.

We don’t choose whom we love, and Jackie loves Marcus, her cousin. What makes this especially hard is the fact they live in the same house. Further complicating Jackie’s summer is the disappearance of Ellie, her best friend, who vanished four months ago without a trace, about six months after moving to a new town. Jackie wishes she had done more to keep in touch—then maybe she’d have a clue about where Ellie went. As Ellie’s mystery deepens and foul play is suspected, Jackie longs to feels safe in Marcus’ arms, but she pushes him away to protect their family from the truth. Debut novelist Brauning tells a touching story of young, star-crossed lovers caught in a drama they have tried hard to avoid. The romance is written realistically, with enough passion to entice readers but without the saccharine trappings that can sometimes ruin a good teen love story. The mystery occasionally feels like an unnecessary dramatic distraction, but it never overshadows the real heart of the book: the relationship between two people who are disadvantaged by the bad luck of birth.

A sweetly written mix of mystery and romantic turmoil.

(Fiction. 14-18)

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BEETLE BUSTERS

Burns, Loree Griffin Photos by Harasimowicz, Ellen HMH Books (64 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-547-79267-5 Series: Scientists in the Field Will chopping down 33,000 trees in Worcester, Massachusetts, save other forests from the destructive Asian longhorned beetle?

Scientists are trying to answer that question as they battle an invasion that probably began 20 years ago in this central Massachusetts city that sits near the wild, natural forests that stretch north to Maine and beyond. Burns, who began her investigations as a resident of the affected area concerned about losing the trees around her, provides a clear, evenhanded description of this difficult issue. For now, chopping down trees and chipping their wood is the only known way to eradicate the pest. But it takes 30 years for new trees to mature. Is it worth it? The author provides solid background for her readers to ponder this question. Chapter by chapter she introduces the arresting-looking beetle, the trees that host it (more than a dozen species are vulnerable), the team of scientists and foresters working in Worcester, and research efforts in a nearby small forest. She presents data available so far and looks ahead to the likelihood of success in the larger battle across the country. Her narrative is framed by the experience of a teen who saw his favorite forest area cut and has watched it regrow. It’s enhanced by Harasimowicz’s clear photographs.

A splendid example of science controversy in everyday life. (author’s note, resources, glossary, bibliography and acknowledgements, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

BEHIND THE BADGE Crimefighters Through History

Butts, Ed Illus. by Williams, Gareth Annick Press (168 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-55451-675-9 978-1-55451-674-2 paper This sweeping look at the history of law enforcement takes readers from ancient China and the pre-Columbian Americas to the 21st century.

As long as humans have lived in communities, there has been a need for policing. Butts introduces readers to methods of policing used by civilizations throughout history in different parts of the world, revealing all sorts of fascinating facts, such as the ancient Chinese were the first to use forensics in criminal investigations. One chapter explores police corruption, and another explains how police have been used as instruments of oppression in authoritarian regimes. Butts also profiles

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famous law enforcement organizations like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, New Scotland Yard, the FBI and Interpol.

Despite the wide range of topics covered, there are surprising omissions. No mention is made of the increasing role of police in counterterrorism or the militarization of community police forces, especially in the United States. There is no discussion of controversial policing tactics such as racial profiling or “stop and frisk.” The narrative, informative but superficial, is complemented with dramatic color illustrations.

A broad and engaging if incomplete introduction to law enforcement through the ages. (glossary, timeline, bibliography, websites, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)

CAPTIVE

Carter, Aimée Harlequin Teen (304 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-373-21128-9 Series: Blackcoat Rebellion, 2 This second installment in the Blackcoat Rebellion series dives further into the book’s dystopia, rounding out the imaginative future America outlined in Pawn (2013).

Kitty Doe, born, she believes, an Extra into a nation that rigidly ranks its citizens into lifelong roles, has taken the place of Lila, the daughter of the autocratic prime minister of the United States, surgically Masked to look like her. Kitty runs afoul of the powers that be in her new palatial home and finds herself shipped to Elsewhere, the deadly, inescapable detention area for criminals and other undesirables. In constant danger, she sleeps in an overcrowded dormitory, eats terrible food and

“A delightful and interactive step into the world of creating engaging picture books for children.”

— Kirkus Reviews, starred review

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works in a highly unpleasant job that furthers the book’s dystopian theme. Now the Blackcoats intend to launch a major attack, and they want her to use her unique position to steal codes that will allow them to unlock advanced weaponry. Doing so, however, will put Kitty in extreme danger and possibly get many others killed as well. With Kitty out of the palace, Carter’s dystopia is free to focus on the dreary and precarious lives of its victims. Character development joins worldbuilding in improvement as well, especially among the Elsewhere inmates who make difficult and deadly choices to survive, which often lead to extreme violence.

With this second installment, Carter has hit her stride.

(Dystopian romance. 14-18)

DREAMING IN INDIAN Contemporary Native American Voices

Charleyboy, Lisa; Leatherdale, Mary Beth—Eds. Annick Press (128 pp.) $19.95 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-55451-687-2 Who are North American Indians today? For answers, meet the poets, fashion models, chefs, scientists, Olympians, YouTube stars, graphic artists, activists, athletes and many others featured in this vibrant, kaleidoscopic anthology.

Contributors, many young adults from first nations across Canada and the United States, portray their experiences in short works that range from flash fiction, essays, songs and poetry to paintings, cartoons and photo collages. Innovative design

by Inti Amaterasu pairs words and art, echoing and amplifying themes of departure and return, integration and discovery.

Writers recount tough, crooked journeys that led to rewarding outcomes, incorporating a complex, difficult, rich heritage in cutting-edge careers. Not all stories are happy, but most move from pain toward hope, even triumph. Twelve years of residential school couldn’t erase her cultural identity from Isabelle Knockwood, Mi’kmaq, whose mother’s early teachings gave her a course to follow. Throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, Inuk, thanks school bullies who tormented her—surviving them gave her the determination and resilience to pursue her dreams. Selfstyled “Salish geek” Jeffrey Veregge draws on a mixed heritage to create his inventive prints. Children of Alberta’s Horse Lake First Nation share what gives them strength. Tired stereotypes are demolished with sly humor. Cree model Ashley Callingbull satirizes fashion’s appropriation of native dress. But stereotypes aren’t always disempowering, as Kelli Clifton, Tsimshian, points out in her exploration of Disney’s Pocahontas.

Original and accessible, both an exuberant work of art and a uniquely valuable resource. (Anthology. 12-18)

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A HERO AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Claiborne, Erin Big Bang Press (304 pp.) $15.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-9904844-0-0 978-0-9904844-2-4 e-book

Destined to destroy the evil overlord, the chosen one adjusts to a disappointing life after his friend does the job instead.

The prophecy stated that Ewan Mao was the one who would kill the tyrant Duff Slan. He spent years training for when the time would come to dispatch the dark lord who had been ruling Britain with an iron fist. But when the final battle took place, Ewan’s best friend, Oliver Abrams, dealt the killing blow. Five years later, Ewan is a footnote in Oliver’s story, working in a crummy coffee shop while Oliver swiftly rises through the ranks of the local police force. Anger and jealousy have festered, and when a secret society approaches Ewan with an opportunity to take Oliver down a peg, Ewan quickly accepts. Ewan and Oliver’s friendship-cum-rivalry offers true pathos, exploring a bond that was supposed to be stronger than steel but that may now be twisted and damaged beyond repair. Claiborne serves up more than just a clever inversion of the “Chosen One” narrative trope by perfectly balancing satire and genuine affection for the genre made popular by Rowling’s series. Those hoping for a Harry Potter sequel and constantly checking Pottermore for updates would do well to put this book on the tops of their to-read piles.

A smart, funny and emotionally engaging tale perfect for any reader who longs for another train ride to Hogwarts. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

THE BANE CHRONICLES

Clare, Cassandra; Rees Brennan, Sarah; Johnson, Maureen McElderry (528 pp.) $22.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-9599-9 Eleven short stories about two centuries in the life of everyone’s favorite bisexual, biracial, immortal warlock from Clare’s hyperpopular Shadowhunters series, most previously published in electronic-

only editions.

The tales begin in 1791 Peru, where the debauched Magnus Bane revels in sex, alcohol and troublemaking. They close in the present day, concerned with relationship dramas and the battles of the prior books. Standing alone, the early stories (featuring a fashion-obsessed Magnus hopping into bed with all attractive comers) are mostly dissatisfying. Taken as a whole, however, the collection shows compelling development of Magnus from flirtatious playboy to flirtatious playboy with a secret heart of

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“…the strong, bright graphics and clean lines make the information readily accessible and easy for young children to grasp.” from full speed ahead!

gold to the fashionable-but-serious High Warlock of Brooklyn who throws himself between innocents and danger. The volume stands as support for Clare’s multiple ongoing series and features too many tales that break off without resolution, satisfying mostly as emotional background for Magnus and his found family. Occasional choppy prose isn’t Clare’s usual mode, though there’s plenty of the more-typical grandiloquent stylings: Eyes are like “grass under the dew,” “a crystal glass filled brimful with crisp white wine and held up to catch the light of a blazing sun” or “deep alluring lakes with sirens in their depths.”

There is less snark as well, perhaps a result of the collaboration with Rees Brennan and Johnson.

Only for series completists and fans of Magnus Bane— but who isn’t a fan of Magnus Bane? (Fantasy. 14 & up)

FULL SPEED AHEAD! How Fast Things Go

Cruschiform Illus. by Cruschiform Abrams (64 pp.) $18.95 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4197-1338-5

This retro-designed information book has a simple intention: to compare things that go at different speeds.

The left-hand page of each spread displays a speed in large type, and on each facing page, animals and vehicles that travel at that speed are illustrated. The speeds go up incrementally from 0.3 kph (sea horse and Galapagos tortoise) to 100,000 kph (shooting star). (English conversions are provided in smaller type.) The “wow” factor is predictably large, and animals often come off as well or better than machines; the humble swift can fly at 200 kph, the same speed as an MD500 helicopter, and a frigate bird can fly as fast as a Formula 1 race car (350 kph). Readers hungry for more than the bare-bones information offered in the spreads can consult the backmatter, which comprises technical descriptions of each vehicle or animal described. There are many nifty factoids that kids will savor, such as the fact that the Earth spins at a mind-blowing average speed of 1,670 kph!

The book’s French origins are evident; along with the metric units, some vehicles may be unfamiliar to American readers.

Nevertheless, the strong, bright graphics and clean lines make the information readily accessible and easy for young children to grasp.

Despite its limited scope, both a relatively useful reference and a gee-whiz compendium of cool speed facts. (Informational picture book. 5-10)

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BROKEN

Curley, Marianne Bloomsbury (384 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-61963-168-7 Series: Avena, 2 Three love interests battle for a teen angel’s hand in this sequel to Hidden (2013).

After defeating Dark Prince Luca, Prince Nathaneal returns to the heavenly realm of Avena to face trial. Instead of staying in Nathaneal’s luxe bachelor pad—holy headquarters after her house burned and parents disappeared—Ebony Hawkins attends high school, hangs out with friends, tries to find her birth mother and works to realize her full angelic potential. But Ebony is easily led astray (by Jordan) and captured (by Luca), proving more pawn than powerful queen despite her intermittent anger issues. While Ebony careens from bewildered to besotted to berserk, punctuating most of her narration with question marks and exclamation points, conarrators Nathaneal and Jordan are equally shallow and stilted.

Nathaneal—her betrothed from before birth—walks into hell, or Skade, for her sake and spouts protestations of undying love in lofty language. Jordan, her mortal Charge, turns from victim to collaborator, veering from street slang to scholarly descriptions of the action. Antagonist Luca is no better—predatory, possessive and ultimately a Satan stand-in lacking sizzle. Curley delivers a shoddily constructed supernatural world with a borrowed angelic hierarchy, flat secondary characters, telegraphed twists and three remarkably unhealthy romantic relationships.

A Bella-like protagonist, bland heroes and a Bond villain make for an unremarkable contribution to the growing legion of trite teen paranormal tales. (Paranormal romance.

12-18)

TOP TEN CLUES YOU’RE CLUELESS

Czukas, Liz HarperTeen (304 pp.) $9.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-06-227242-3 978-0-06-227243-0 e-book

A bookish, diabetic newcomer to her neighborhood lives through one difficult day at the grocery store where she works.

It’s Christmas Eve, so all hands are called to work at GoodFoods, starting early in the morning. Chloe works as a checker there, and she’s not too surprised to find that all the “Younglings” (as Chloe’s favorite shift manager calls them) will be working with her all day.

Despite the annoying Christmas music playing throughout the store, all goes fairly well until a TV crew arrives for the opening of the charity box, only to find that the box is nearly empty when it should have held nearly $10,000. Now all under suspicion, the

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“Lou’s evenly paced narration is Hollywood-script–ready….” from little white lies

Younglings are held after closing time, waiting for the police to arrive. The wait grows into hours, and Chloe begins to suffer from low blood sugar, but she doesn’t want to reveal her diabetes to anyone. Czukas writes in a chatty, engaging style that makes Chloe’s present-tense account a quick, enjoyable read; Chloe’s compulsive list-making adds some fun. Both the hunt for the thief and Chloe’s impending diabetic crash contribute to the suspense. The real charm of the book is its character study of Chloe and her hesitant outreach to the other characters; although billed as a romance, this is a book about forming friendships.

Charming, fun and insightful. (Fiction. 12-18)

LITTLE WHITE LIES

Dale, Katie Delacorte (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-385-74067-8 978-0-375-89973-7 e-book 978-0-385-98960-5 PLB Sometimes lying is the only way to get to the truth for one teen in this British thriller.

As the niece of the most famous inmate in the country, the narrator, a first-year “uni” student, has changed her name to Louise Shepherd. But navigating her new identity is tricky when her latest friend is a budding investigative journalist and a computer-hacker classmate from her past turns up (on purpose?) in the same town. And then there’s young bartender Christian Webb, who has secrets of his own. Lou’s evenly paced narration is Hollywood-script–ready as readers learn bit by bit about her cousin who lies in a coma, her culpability in her uncle’s prison sentence and Christian’s connections to her family’s tragedies. As the story twists and turns even more with vigilante thugs and possible police coverups, Lou finds herself on the run and trying to prove Christian’s innocence. But she’s not sure whether proving his innocence is for him or her. And are her loyalties to her family or the one she now loves? Along with uncovering clues, Lou discovers that right and wrong become confused when feelings are involved.

Slight Briticisms make the fact-finding all the more interesting as readers keep guessing in this gripping whodunit. (Thriller. 14 & up)

A POSSUM’S TAIL

Dawnay, Gabby Illus. by Barrow, Alex Tate/Abrams (40 pp.) $19.95 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-84976-221-2

Dawney and Barrow here offer the tale of a little boy who navigates the streets of 1940s London to visit the possums at the zoo.

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A bit reminiscent of Madeline (1939) with its rhyming text, recognizable metropolitan landmarks and purposeful youngster wearing a hat that trails ribbons, this follows Samuel and his “dog-on-wheels” through a bustling cityscape. Urban diversity is captured through varying skin tones, hairstyles and fashion choices. While the poetry scans smoothly, the first half of the book merely describes what the eye can see: “They pass the man who sells balloons, / they pass the band that’s playing tunes.” A pleasing narrative symmetry, however, becomes evident midway through. To the left of the gutter, five baby possums are sleeping, tails wrapped round the branch above; on the right, their eyes open and watch Sam depart. The rest of the story mirrors the beginning, except that the five possums join tail to tail with the toy dog Sam is dragging. While the boy is oblivious to his parade, the passersby, palace guards and street vendors are riveted; the humor derives from the onlookers’ distracted mishaps and the text/image contrast. The balloons play a part in the animals’ return to the zoo, but a surprise awaits the child at home. Cream-colored, matte backgrounds offer a restful backdrop for the tale’s colorful cacophony.

This understated British romp will have readers absorbed in its details. (Picture book. 3- 6)

REMAKING THE JOHN The Invention and Reinvention of the Toilet

DiPiazza, Francesca Davis Twenty-First Century/Lerner (64 pp.) $34.60 PLB | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4677-2645-0 PLB

A brief history of the crapper.

The toilet and its use has been called pretty much everything under the sun, from thunder bowl to “plucking a rose,” when the outhouse was located in the garden. DiPiazza covers them all in her illuminating history of the toilet—or, more to the point, disposal of human waste: “Half a solid pound (0.2 kilograms), plus 47 ounces (1.4 liters) of liquid....that’s how much feces and urine an adult human produces, on average, every day.” Those words are from the first two sentences of the book, so the giggles and snorts are dispensed with quickly, and we get down to the very real issue of waste and health.

As humans took to settlements and populations increased, sewage became an instant issue. DiPiazza goes back to Deuteronomy for some historical setting before soldiering through most known waste-disposal tools and systems. Lurking always is waste-bred disease, like plague and cholera, which really step hard on the giggles and snorts. Public health and sanitation become the driving issues, which DiPiazza handles adeptly, with the accompaniment of many fine archival images and illustrations, as well as photographs.

A good-spirited, wholly serious broaching of the— incredibly—still-taboo subject of human waste, once a problem and even more so today. (Nonfiction. 11-18)

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PHINEAS L. MACGUIRE . . .

GETS COOKING!

Dowell, Frances O’Roark Illus. by McDaniels, Preston Atheneum (208 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4814-0099-2 Series: Highly Scientific Notebooks of Phineas L. MacGuire Fourth-grade scientist Phineas L. MacGuire is back for another outing, exploring science ideas in the world around him and figuring out a way to deal with the class bully.

He’s supported by his friends, fellow scientist Aretha, who’s working on a Girl Scout cooking badge, and polar-opposite Ben, who seems to live largely for bacon (even in brownies).

Tasked with cooking his family’s supper for the foreseeable future, Phineas comes to understand—and to explain to readers—some of the scientific principles of cooking, including how yeast and baking soda make foods rise. What he’s less able to make sense of is why class bully Evan has suddenly focused on him, strong-arming him into cooking brownies for him almost every day—or else. With few viable options, Phineas does what any good scientist would; he attempts to study Evan’s behavior— with unexpected results that offer both insight and a resource for kids dealing with their own bullies. Unlike previous Phineas stories, this one lacks science experiments, but with new information about how some aspects of cooking work, readers could develop their own. McDaniels’ softly shaded illustrations are attractive and numerous, but they don’t always quite match with descriptions in the text.

Phineas, good-humored and insightful in his believable first-person voice, once again provides a pertinent, easy-toread tale for grade schoolers. (Fiction. 7-11)

THE FIRE SEEKERS

Farr, Richard Skyscape (364 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-4778-4773-2 Series: Babel Trilogy, 1

A teen takes on the mysteries of the world—some real, some imagined—in this erudite thriller.

Seventeen-year-old Daniel Calder’s father is an expert on ancient languages (aka a Babbler, named for the biblical story of the Tower of Babel); his mother is an equally prestigious mathematician who’s interested in recent disappearances of women around the world. Their careers often tear the family apart, sending home-schooled, dyslexic Daniel with his father to look for clues about the Phaistos Disk (a fictional relic that may be evidence of an unknown ancient civilization) or climbing mountains with his mother in Patagonia. When his mother dies in |

a bizarre accident, the teen begins to connect the elements of his scattered life. Adding to the mix in this ambitious, sometimes heavy-handed trilogy opener is Julius Quinn, a former graduate assistant to Daniel’s father, who’s become an overnight cult leader to followers who may know a stairway to heaven. Along with his half-Chinese, half-Scottish “twin sister” Morag, another Babbler and his father’s protégée, Daniel seeks answers to both personal questions (Was his mother killed? Is there a connection between her death and the missing women?) and highly intellectual ones (Why do humans have language?

Where are the intersections of religion, myth and truth?). And he might just save humanity, too.

A niche read for advanced, philosophical readers. (author’s notes) (Thriller. 14 & up)

I LOVE MY HAT

Florian, Douglas Illus. by Keiser, Paige Two Lions (24 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-4778-4780-0 Lively illustrations stand out in this rustic tale.

Unkempt Farmer Brown takes his tractor on a trip into town, and along the way he meets various animals frolicking in singular sartorial splendor. After each animal sings a little ditty about how much it loves its item of clothing, Farmer Brown invites them, Mr. Gumpy–like, to “[h]op aboard.” This template is repeated on each spread with a different animal and a different article of clothing (the calico cat wears a hat, the turtledoves wear gloves, and so on), and by the end, the tractor is filled and they’ve all arrived in town. There, the animals urge Farmer Brown to go get himself some new clothes, and after he does, he sings his own song about how much he loves his new outfit. Because most of the spreads are nearly identical in narrative, with only the rhyming animal-and-clothing pairs changing, the overall effect is a stale storyline that dampens rather than builds tension. Mr. Gumpy’s punt tips over, unlike this tractor.

The illustrations, by contrast, are executed with a lively line and cheerful watercolor washes that entertain the eye. While they try their best to lift up the flat storyline, they do not succeed.

The endpapers, in a somber, unrelieved dark blue, do nothing to add story interest.

A repetitive picture book that struggles to be interesting. (Picture book. 2-5)

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EMPIRE OF SHADOWS

Forster, Miriam HarperTeen (496 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-212133-2 978-0-06-212135-6 e-book Series: City of a Thousand Dolls, 2 A young bodyguard in search of redemption finds love and court intrigue in this Asian-influenced fantasy.

Three years ago, Mara’s clan of tiger shape-shifters exiled her for committing unforgiveable crimes.

She found refuge and purpose in the Order of Khatar, whose members do penance for past sins by dedicating their lives to the protection of others. Now 18, Mara is traveling to the capital when she saves a boy from a vicious tiger and forges an immediate connection with his twin, Emil. Unsurprisingly, their paths cross again in the city, when Mara’s job as a bodyguard for a high-ranking noble and Emil’s search for his now-runaway brother entangle both in the dangerous webs of imperial politics. While Mara and Emil are both developed as individual characters, their romance falls strangely flat, and their scenes together lack spark. The worldbuilding borrows many surface details from South Asian culture, but little is explored in much depth. Readers may struggle to keep the large cast of characters straight, even with the helpful dramatis personae at the beginning of the book. Though the novel is a prequel to Forster’s debut, City of a Thousand Dolls (2013), it can be read as a standalone; only the epilogue will perplex readers who have skipped the first book.

Uneven and unsatisfying. (Fantasy. 13-18)

MATISSE’S GARDEN

Friedman, Samantha Illus. by Amodeo, Cristina The Museum of Modern Art (48 pp.) $19.95 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-87070-910-4 This book ingeniously narrates Matisse’s paper-cutout process visually, using the same medium as the artwork created by the painter while bedridden

during his final years.

Amodeo’s elegant cutouts pay homage to the great artist by illustrating the evolution of Matisse’s use of this medium, from the creation of simple shapes such as birds and bees, through analysis of color harmony and relationships and exploration of positive and negative space, to pattern and composition. The artwork is so skillfully applied and photographed that the illusion of cut-paper shapes is maintained throughout. The elderly, bespectacled figure of Matisse is portrayed in cutout form as he experiments with shapes, first cutting out a simple bird, then adding shapes reminiscent of seaweed and fish inspired by his travels in Polynesia, then flying like the birds he is creating. Not 100

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satisfied with the white shapes, Matisse asks his assistants to paint sheets of paper in a range of shades so he can cut directly into color and experiment with different color combinations.

Eight of Matisse’s original works are reproduced at intervals throughout the book, carefully chosen to illustrate key aspects of the artist’s intention.

In its inventive approach to teaching art history, this book should inspire teachers and students alike to experiment with color, shape and form in the same free and expressive mode as the master. (Informational picture book.

5-10)

OUTSIDE

Gill, Deirdre Illus. by Gill, Deirdre HMH Books (40 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-547-91065-9 A little boy’s imagination creates a beautiful, mysterious, snowy world outside his home.

Expressive oils on paper are equally adept at showing the snow’s softness and a little boy’s changing moods. The wraparound cover art immediately draws readers in, and the quotation from Yeats opposite the dedication sets the tone: “The world is full of magic things, / patiently waiting / for our senses to grow sharper.” The first double-page spread shows an isolated, wooden house in steadily falling snow with these words: “Outside, snow falls silently on the house.” The next two pages illustrate the sentence, “Inside, a boy has nothing to do.” When the boy goes outside, his mood begins to lift, despite his disappointment at an older brother’s refusal to join him. By the end of the boy’s time outside, an enchanting, magical world of castles and snow creatures has elevated his spirits—and will have a similar effect on readers. The palette moves through the colors of a perfect winter’s day in New England, from the blue-grays of falling snow to the golden-pink tones of sunset— ideal colors for the boy’s dragon ride—to the deeper blues of approaching evening. The double-page spread that introduces the dragon is especially enthralling.

Readers will want to reread the simple but meaningful text and bask again in the glorious illustrations of this splendid debut. (Picture book. 3-8)

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“Rife with atmosphere, adventure and romance, this is a fantasy world worth getting lost in for a while.” from ravencliffe

WEREWOLF PARALLEL

Gill, Roy Kelpiesteen (275 pp.) $9.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-178250-054-4 Series: Daemon Parallel, 2

The separate worlds—and the Parallel between—face a threat that Cameron and his friends must stop in this Scottish import.

A pre-prologue exposition explains how a conspiracy attempted to separate the Human and Daemon worlds, achieving only partial separation and instead creating a gap between worlds. That gap—the Parallel—allows only the descendants of the World Split conspirators who caused it to travel between worlds. After a prologue, readers encounter Cameron and his friends from Daemon Parallel (2012)—werewolf Morgan and Eve, the young ex-Daemon servant who was prematurely aged to adulthood when her ex-mistress stole her body—running Cameron’s evil grandmother’s business. Dr Black arrives with a large, lumpy Mr Grey and a convincing legal claim on the business that sends the young heroes to the Parallel’s Court, where, unless they can prove Cameron’s dead grandmother still lives, they’ll lose everything. The wild plot involves mythological figures, deals forged on technicalities and the revelation that their adversaries have a bigger goal than the business. The madcap world is grounded by the relationships among characters as well as their struggles to fit into any world; newly minted werewolf Cameron’s wolf-longings and the disjuncture between Eve’s chronological and physical ages especially stand out. The villain goes from gross to terrifying, and the heroes end up making a bittersweet sacrifice that will leave readers demanding a continuation.

Clever, creative and fun. (Fantasy. 10-15)

RAVENCLIFFE

Goodman, Carol Viking (432 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-670-78477-6 Series: Blythewood, 2 Half-breed Darkling Avaline Hall makes a triumphant return in the second installment of the Blythewood series.

Readers will be reunited with Ava a mere two months after her first, nearly fatal victory over the Shadow Master, Judicus van Drood. But when young girls begin to mysteriously disappear, it becomes clear that van Drood and his shadow demons are back and more determined than ever to see darkness prevail. Shrouded in mist and mystery, turn-of-the-20th-century New York again provides an atmospheric backdrop as Ava and her friends, both human and mystical, realize they must break down the walls of prejudice and join forces if they hope to win the battle against |

van Drood. That’s easier said than done, as secrets abound, and the desire to conceal them threatens to destroy the alliance before it’s even formed. Ava herself, having felt like an outcast for so long, struggles to conceal the undeniable truth of her halfbreed blood and her love for the Darkling boy named Raven.

Though the tale and its message are sometimes heavy-handed, readers will readily relate to Ava and the other characters who struggle to embrace their differences and to stand up and fight for what they believe in.

Rife with atmosphere, adventure and romance, this is a fantasy world worth getting lost in for a while. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU

Gray, Claudia HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 e-book | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-227896-8 978-0-06-227898-2 e-book

A girl and her two possible heartthrobs travel across parallel universes to avenge her father’s murder.

Marguerite’s parents are both brilliant scientists, inventors of a device called the Firebird that allows the bearer to travel across the multiverse. When her dad dies in a car crash after his brake lines have been cut, everyone blames Paul, one of two research assistants working for the couple. But Paul has escaped by using the Firebird to travel to another universe. Theo, the other assistant, teams up with Marguerite in a prototype to chase Paul. They discover that although some things are different from universe to universe—technology in particular—the people are the same.

Inhabiting the bodies of their parallel selves, they find Paul, but things go awry and they wind up traveling to yet another world: a nicely drawn parallel czarist Russia where Marguerite is the czarina and secretly in love with that world’s Paul. But she’s also attracted to Theo. And, in the parallel worlds, who is really who? Gray doesn’t worry much about actual science in her science fiction, muddling the concept of multiple universes with that of multiple dimensions, but she keeps the plot moving and has some good fun keeping all of the parallel people sorted.

This trilogy opener offers solid entertainment for readers willing to go with the fictional flow. (Science fiction. 12-18)

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“As Little Red Riding Hood proceeds through the wood, subsequent, die-cut pages continue to lift and turn, creating a layered dimensionality.” from little red riding hood

ESCAPE FROM TIBET A True Story

Gray, Nick with Scandiffio, Laura Annick Press (160 pp.) $21.95 | $12.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-55451-663-6 978-1-55451-662-9 paper Two Tibetans, 19-year-old Pasang and his 11-year-old brother, Tenzin, flee Tibet, a harrowing escape that includes hiking—in street clothes and worn sneakers—over the 19,000-foot-high “Death Pass” of the Himalayas.

Pasang had already left Chinese-run Tibet once, becoming a novice Buddhist monk in India, returning home to help his brother seek a better life. The pair travels by train cross-country to Lhasa, where they spend several weeks evading Chinese police and amassing a nest egg by begging. A first attempt to cross a bridge to Nepal leads to capture and torture by Chinese border guards. That makes the frigid, perilous journey over the world’s highest mountains seem like a safer alternative, but their suffering is intense, and even their eventual safe arrival in Nepal doesn’t appear to guarantee the refugee status that will allow them to remain. During their flight, part of their journey is filmed by a British team and later made into a documentary; co-author Gray is the filmmaker. Although this collaboration includes dialogue that can only be surmised, Pasang and Tenzin subsequently “shared...extensive descriptions of their experiences and feelings” with Gray, which grounds the account. The graphic depiction of their experiences is so riveting that it reads like fiction, making the photographic insert a jarring reminder of reality.

A valuable and fascinating resource, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. (glossary, timeline of Tibet, history of Chinese-Tibetan relations, history of Buddhism in Tibet) (Nonfiction. 11-16)

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

The Brothers Grimm Illus. by Schenker, Sybille Translated by Bell, Anthea Minedition (44 pp.) $29.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-988-8240-79-1 As she did with Hansel and Gretel (2013), Schenker employs intricate die cuts, patterned prints, bold lines and basic colors to create a haunting journey through the familiar Grimms tale.

Opposite the first page of text, Little Red Riding Hood poses in her cape against a thicket of die-cut vines, through which readers can discern a sun-dappled forest and the ominous black silhouette of a wolf. With the turn of the page, readers see on the recto the little girl’s back as she proceeds into the wood and the Wolf about to emerge from the trees; on verso, her promise to obey her mother is printed within the shape of 102

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her image from the previous page. As Little Red Riding Hood proceeds through the wood, subsequent, die-cut pages continue to lift and turn, creating a layered dimensionality. The sleeping grandmother can be glimpsed through the window of her cottage; as the page turns, she is revealed in her bed, while the wolf ’s menacing face can be seen through that same window from the interior. The “All the better to eat you with!” moment is suitably terrifying: Cuts in the black page evoke the snarling wolf by revealing the crimson page beneath, but the image is so stylized that it appears almost abstract, its impact emotional rather than graphic.

Schenker’s illustrations and design combine with Bell’s graceful translation to take the breath away. (Picture book/ fairy tale. 5-10)

LITTLE BIRD, BE QUIET!

Hall, Kirsten Illus. by Gibson, Sabina Blue Apple (36 pp.) $14.99 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-60905-520-2

A loquacious bird is first shunned then valued for his talkative nature.

Little Bird has a lot to say. He asks questions of his parents, tries to engage with his siblings and chatters on to other woodland creatures. No one has time for him or any interest in what he has to say, so he retreats to a little brook. There, he finds another bird who doesn’t tell him to “Be quiet!” and instead “smile[s], laugh[s], and flap[s] his wings at everything Little Bird sa[ys].” Accompanying illustrations reveal that Little Bird is talking to his own reflection in the brook, and here the story unravels a bit: Whereas earlier scenes might provoke sympathy for Little Bird when others ignore him, this scene develops him as an incessant chatterbox less interested in back-and-forth conversation than in stream-of-consciousness soliloquy. He fails to notice that he’s talking to himself or that “the bird in the water” doesn’t respond to his questions and comments. Nevertheless, his family and the other animals end up missing his chatter, and they tell him so and welcome their garrulous loved one back into the fold. Gibson’s illustrations are made of photographed tableaux of the animal characters and setting detail sculpted from fabric and other materials, and they steal the show with lively, expressive characterization.

A visual treat, even if Little Bird is a little much. (Picture book. 3- 6)

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THE JACKET

Hall, Kirsten Illus. by Tolstikova, Dasha Enchanted Lion Books (48 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 27, 2014 978-1-59270-168-1 When a dog named Egg Cream muddies the cover of his young mistress’s favorite book, the girl figures out how to make everyone feel better.

The text is in the third person, but the story is told from a book’s point of view—a whimsical rarity. The book—aptly named Book—has been waiting, Corduroy-like, for a child to appreciate his fine qualities. (“He was solid and strong. His words were smart and playful.”) After the girl—known simply as “the girl”—has acquired Book, he and the girl are ecstatic companions until the girl’s other love—whom Book refuses to call anything but Dog—manages to muddy Book. The mixed-media illustrations do a beautiful job of capturing such things as the interior of a bookstore, the girl’s love for both her companions and the tragic moment of mud. Fortunately, if unrealistically, the mud has not damaged Book’s pages; Book bravely refuses to cry, as “Tears would ruin his ink and paper.” After a dark night for Book and the girl, the girl wakes up refreshed and ready to solve the problem of Book’s muddy cover. Book’s understanding of the girl’s love for her dog is a particularly poignant inclusion, both textually and visually.

The idea’s originality and the child-friendly instructions at the end of Book’s tale make this a novel gift pick for the juvenile bibliophile. (book-jacket instructions) (Picture book. 4-8)

THE WATCHER

Harlow, Joan Hiatt McElderry (304 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-2911-6 978-1-4424-2913-0 e-book As World War II rages, a naïve almost– 15-year-old American girl is brought to Berlin by her German spy mother; there, she’s expected to be a perfect Deutsches Madchen (German girl) and a loyal Nazi.

Harlow’s exciting historical novel begins with a bang as readers learn that Wendy Taylor, a character from Shadows on the Sea (2003), is really Wendy Dekker, the daughter of the woman she grew up thinking was her beloved Aunt Adrie. In a plot that neatly weaves historical facts with killer suspense, Wendy, now essentially a captive of her rabidly fanatical fan-of-the-Fuhrer mother, must learn German and volunteer in a Lebensborn nursery, a eugenics program created by Himmler to create perfect blue-eyed, blond German citizens. There, her world perspective is enlarged by Jehovah’s Witness Joanna, a Bibelforscher who is being re-educated, as her religious sect will not fight for |

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or worship Hitler. But Wendy is not as isolated as she thinks; she’s being watched over by Herr Strohkirch, a friend of her real father, and his blind grandson, Barret. They feed her information, counsel her on blending in and eventually help her to plot her escape. The final portion of the novel consists of Wendy’s harrowing journey—a nail-biting will-she-or-won’t-she flight from Germany to the relative safety of neutral Sweden.

A stimulating blend of suspense and history. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

PRINCESS PATTY MEETS HER MATCH

Harper, Charise Mericle Illus. by Harper, Charise Mericle Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.) $16.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-4231-0804-7

When her Prince Charming fails to materialize, Princess Patty takes matters into her own hands.

Weary waiting for her prince to come, Princess Patty dons her “favorite comfy shoes” and “super-sparkly knapsack” and begins the quest to find her prince. She rejects a prince who offers a glass slipper and tries to yank off her shoe. She rejects a foolish prince who thinks he’s fighting dragons by snaring dragonflies in a net. She’s not interested in a prince who wants to wake her with a kiss, as she’s already awake, and he has chapped lips. She avoids a prince stashing peas under a stack of mattresses and opts not to kiss a potential frog prince. Even the fairy godmother she meets is too confused to help her. Discouraged by the pool of princes, Princess Patty returns to her castle, where she finally finds her perfect match. Simple, childlike illustrations rely on pastel hues, precise lines and decorative patterns to create a fairy-tale innocence, tracking Princess Patty’s quest across a landscape of stylized castles, hills, flowers and trees. Wearing high-top sneakers, a flowered tunic and sparkly backpack, Princess Patty resembles a savvy contemporary girl who knows what she wants far better than the traditional fairy-tale princess.

This proactive princess will captivate readers with her charmingly unconventional tale. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE PERFECT PLACE

Harris, Teresa E. Clarion (272 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-547-25519-4

A spirited, stubborn and loyal girl finds the perfect place exactly where she doesn’t want it.

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sister, Tiffany, with their father’s aunt while she tries to track him down. His disappearing act is not new, so Treasure has coping mechanisms: Don’t get too attached to a place, and don’t make friends. Neither should be hard, as Great-Aunt Grace is mean, and Black Lake, Virginia, is boring. But Treasure seems to attract trouble, and trouble attracts friends. Harris’ first novel lets readers inside the heads and hearts of her characters as Treasure and Grace, both hardheaded, inevitably find their rhythms. Despite a simple and predictable plot, readers will be firmly engaged by the funny, genuine dialogue and effortless prose that evokes a hot summer and Grace’s cluttered house and store. Side characters are well-defined, and Treasure’s voice is singular, smart and memorable.

Though good family-in-transition stories are not rare, ones that authentically portray an African-American experience are, and readers will find this one pretty near perfect. (Fiction. 10-13)

MINE!

Heap, Sue Illus. by Heap, Sue Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-6888-4 Playtime isn’t easy when you have three toys and four kids—or is it?

Amy is very attached to her blankie, Bear, Bunny and Bird.

“I love you all,” she tells them, “because we’re together and you’re MINE.” Enter twins Zack and Jack to disturb her halcyon moment. “Can we play?” they ask, but without waiting for a definitive answer, they pick up Bear and Bunny and carelessly toss them in the air. Next, angry Amy engages the twins in a toy tug of war. Meanwhile, while no one is looking, Baby Joe has entered the scene, taking his place on Amy’s blanket and scooping up Bird, which he squeezes and kisses. When Amy sees her toy has been confiscated, she snatches it away. Baby Joe stands small and alone on the page, eyebrows slanted upward in distress, smile turned to frown. The sight of the woebegone baby stops all three. “He’s all alone...without a toy,” the twins observe. Amy has the solution. The illustrations. rendered in vibrant colored pencil and acrylic, have no background—only a simple horizon line, which keeps the focus on the characters.

The human figures have sizable faces, emphasizing their expressions and emotions. Sharp-eyed readers will see that the toys themselves are troubled by the strife, and their smiling faces (and beaks) reflect their happiness when fair play resumes.

A sweet, simple addition to the parade of pedagogical books about sharing. (Picture book. 2-5)

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THE ACCIDENT

Hendrick, Kate Text (272 pp.) $9.95 paper | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-921922-85-5 Three teens reflect on the impact a single car collision has on their lives before and after the titular event in this introspective debut.

Before witnessing the accident and assisting the victims, 17-year-old Eliat was so tired of trying to stay in school while raising a toddler and adhering to her foster parents’ house rules that she nearly made the biggest mistake of her life. After breaking up with her boyfriend the night of the accident, Will’s older sister, Lauren, comes home after a long time away, and her re-entry into the family brings some sad and disturbing memories to light. Months later, Sarah is attempting to start over at a new school and rekindle her passion for art and photography after the accident that damaged her leg and killed her brother. While the structure of the novel is intriguing, the connections among the three characters are not always obvious and require careful reading to ferret out. In addition, Sarah’s and Will’s quiet, interior voices are not readily distinguishable from each other.

Eliat’s character shows the most development of the three, and her arresting story serves as the impetus that pushes the otherwise subdued story forward.

A thoughtful, philosophical novel for teens interested in or dealing with the aftereffects of trauma. (Fiction. 12-18)

JIM’S LION

Hoban, Russell Illus. by Deacon, Alexis Candlewick (64 pp.) $15.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-6517-3

Illustrator Deacon offers a dramatic, disturbing interpretation of an alreadyunsettling story of childhood illness.

The story remains the same as in the earlier version, a picture book with soft pencil-and-pastel illustrations by Ian Andrew (2001), the text both allusive and elusive. However, the presentations and quite likely the audiences vary considerably. Young Jim suffers from an unspecified condition that requires some sort of surgery to cure. Nurse Bami (from “Africa,” a vague description that risks allegations of cultural insensitivity) suggests imaginative and spiritual ways to find the strength to cope with his fear and anxiety. Wordless dream (or more accurately, nightmare) sequences presented in panels make up more than half the pages, expanding the vision and intensifying the impact of Hoban’s words.

Occasional touches of humor appear, as when a series of animals auditions for the role of Jim’s animal “finder,” but more often, the watercolor pictures portray a surreal world, with a

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“Careful readers will find amusing details in the mixed-media illustrations….” from the winter train

menacing rabbit magician or the eponymous lion displaying his fierce fangs. A muted and limited color palette causes splashes of blood red to stand out startlingly just as the spare, low-key telling heightens the paintings’ emotional heft.

Of possible interest to caregivers seeking books with bibliotherapeutic potential, this difficult and inventive work is most likely to be appreciated for its artistic vision.

(Graphic/fiction hybrid. 7-10)

THE FLOCK FACTOR

Howard, Martin Illus. by Janes, Andy Candlewick (96 pp.) $4.99 paper | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-7535-6 Series: Shaun the Sheep—Tales from Mossy Bottom Farm, 1

travel south by train together to avoid the long winter. The cover illustration, with Bear, Squirrel and Eagle in a train made of cardboard boxes, suggests the playful fantasy within. First the animals rush around to pack. They say their goodbyes to those who will stay. Tortoise arrives last, and the group sets off, but Genet soon realizes that Squirrel is missing. Careful readers will find amusing details in the mixed-media illustrations (probably colored pencil and watercolor; some cut-paper images are set on a white background). Cat can’t find his toothbrush, but his hairbrush hangs high in a tree. Bear has a backpack; the little rodent rides inside. Readers who are familiar with the linear nature of railroad tracks will blink at how easily the conductor “[brings] the train to a halt and turn[s] back” to retrieve Squirrel; others may notice inconsistencies in the train’s trajectory and orientation. This quibble aside, the book is a fine read-aloud for a fall storytime.

A pleasing import, available in both English and its original Spanish. (Picture book. 3-5)

It’s sheep vs. chicken in a farmyard talent showdown!

Film studio Aardman’s Shaun the sheep and the other denizens of the barnyard at Mossy Bottom Farm are having a normal day...well a normal-for-them day: Bitzer the sheepdog is listening to his headphones, and Timmy the lamb is flying a kite made of underwear (with disastrous results). The Farmer suddenly gets excited about something he’s read in the newspaper, a Mossy Bottom’s Got Talent competition. He straight away starts practicing his balloon animals; unfortunately, they all look deformed. Shaun and company decide to have their own talent show, which becomes a sheepvs.-chicken throwdown when the chickens laugh quite cruelly at Shirley the sheep’s dance-act practice. Things look dismal for the sheep in the competition until Shaun hears Shirley singing... but after her embarrassment in front of the chickens, can he convince her to sing in front of the whole farm? The characters from the television show (and upcoming movie) Shaun the Sheep induce smiles in this first in a tie-in series. Much like the stopmotion shows, there is no dialogue to speak of; all is narration and description. The sight gags Aardman projects are famous for work surprisingly well in this mostly text/comics hybrid tale.

Fans will be in sheep-y stitches. (final art and activities not seen) (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 5-8)

THE WINTER TRAIN

Isern, Susanna Illus. by García, Ester Cuento de Luz (24 pp.) $16.95 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-84-15784-84-5

When Squirrel is left behind on the animals’ annual journey south, they return to collect him and then must work together to make a passage through the snow.

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GOODNIGHT ALREADY!

John, Jory Illus. by Davies, Benji Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-06-228620-8

Animals with differing internal rhythms find it challenging to be neighbors in this nocturnal tale.

Duck is full of energy; sitting in his brightly lit, yellow kitchen, he sips coffee while perusing 101 Ways to Stay Awake.

Bear, by contrast, stands sleepily at the base of the staircase in his dimly lit living room, stuffed rabbit dangling from one massive paw. Just after Bear climbs the steps and settles in, Duck raps on the door, wide awake. “Wanna play cards?...Watch a movie?...Start a band?...Make smoothies?” To each suggestion, Bear simply says “No.” This pattern plays out three times, each episode ending with one or the other voicing the titular refrain until the beleaguered bear is finally wide awake, and the duck drifts off. The relationship between a lumbering, grumpy character and a frenetic extrovert will be familiar to grown-up fans of cartoons, and Duck’s ludicrous behavior and costumes will no doubt elicit giggles from young listeners. Davies brings an animator’s sensibility to his uncluttered compositions; variation in page color and typeface as well as skillful manipulation of facial features signal emotional states. The texture of the hairy bear and the occasional patterns on the floor and bedspread add interest to the flat backgrounds.

That’s all, though, folks. With its one-joke plot and dramatic potential, it’s better suited to school and library use than repeat readings in a lap at home. (Picture book. 3- 6)

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“The appropriate background and clear, easy-to-understand explanations make this one-of-a-kind title both accessible and interesting.” from chernobyl’s wild kingdom

CHERNOBYL’S WILD KINGDOM Life in the Dead Zone

Johnson, Rebecca L. Twenty-First Century/Lerner (64 pp.) $34.60 PLB | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-1154-8 PLB To the surprise of many, some wildlife flourishes in Chernobyl, Ukraine, more than 25 years after the explosion at the nuclear power plant there.

After opening with a background chapter describing the 1986 disaster, evacuation and cleanup efforts, Johnson goes on to describe scientific studies on the wildlife in the area from which humans have been excluded. The present-day Exclusion Zone is an area along the Ukraine-Belarus border about the size of South Carolina. A very few human residents have returned; occasional visitors include scientists and journalists. But other large mammals survive. The author includes a scientist’s photographs of a red fox and a moose. Observers have seen wild boar and stray dogs. A herd of Przewalski’s horses, captive-bred and released into this isolated area, seems to be flourishing. The author devotes chapters to radioactive bank voles, rodents that seem to have developed some resistance, and to barn swallows that, in contrast, display obvious abnormalities. Finally, she reminds readers that in 2011 the world experienced a similar nuclear meltdown, in Fukushima, Japan. Continued research on radiation effects is crucial. Still, life carries on. This clear presentation is supplemented with captioned photographs, explanatory boxes and a helpful map. The appropriate background and clear, easy-to-understand explanations make this one-of-a-kind title both accessible and interesting.

An important story clearly and engagingly told by an experienced science writer. (author’s note, glossary, source notes, bibliography, further resources, index) (Nonfiction.12-16)

TALON

Kagawa, Julie Harlequin Teen (416 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-373-21139-5 Series: Talon Saga, 1 Dragons dwell among us in this contemporary romantic fantasy.

Sixteen-year-old Ember and her twin brother, Dante, are dragon shape-shifters living in a world oblivious to their existence. Raised in secrecy and isolation by the ruthless dragon organization Talon, they’ve come to Crescent Beach for a summer of relative freedom to learn how to assimilate into human society. Restless and rebellious, Ember has been anticipating this summer for years, but it proves to be anything but carefree when she meets Riley, a dangerously appealing rogue dragon, 106

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and develops very undraconic feelings for Garret, a human boy she meets on the beach. Little does Ember know that Garret is a veteran soldier from the dragon-slaying Order of St. George, and his mission is to identify and assassinate any dragons hiding in Crescent Beach. Ember and Garret’s star-crossed romance is par for the course for teen paranormal romances, as is Riley’s role as a jealous rival, but readers swooning over the kisses are unlikely to complain about the familiarity. Kagawa rotates the first-person, present-tense narration among the three leads.

Though the prose is often repetitive, the insight into their respective experiences is welcome, and Ember’s and Garret’s outsider perspectives on teen social rituals are reliably amusing.

Fans of the genre will be happy to overlook this series opener’s occasional lapses of style. (Paranormal romance. 14-18)

GUILTY? Crime, Punishment, and the Changing Face of Justice

Kanefield, Teri HMH Books (144 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-544-14896-3

Case studies form the nucleus of this introduction to the ever changing nature of crime and punishment in the United States.

This slim volume seeks to introduce young readers to the various complexities of crime and punishment. An important aspect of these ideas is how society’s views have changed over the years. By following the law school model and exploring actual cases, readers are able to ponder abstract ideas via concrete examples. One of the first cases involves a 12-year-old who knowingly purchased a valuable baseball card at much less than its market value. Was this theft or merely taking advantage of a clerk’s error? Many of the examples are more consequential and show the far-reaching nature of criminal law. There are cases involving race, mental competence, the banking system, terrorism and more. This wide range is both a strength and weakness: Readers can get a sense of the law’s pervasiveness, but it also means that each subject receives limited coverage. The author is clear that this book is designed to raise questions and encourage readers to delve further. The format does not add much to aid in engagement: Occasional photographs and sidebars do little to relieve the text. There is a helpful glossary, suggestions for further reading, source notes and a comprehensive bibliography.

Given the paucity of books on the law for young readers, this fills a niche, but here’s hoping a more engaging and vibrant replacement comes along soon. (photo credits, index not seen) (Nonfiction. 10-16)

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WATERFALL

Kate, Lauren Random House (400 pp.) $18.99 | $9.99 e-book | $21.99 PLB Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-385-74267-2 978-0-307-97632-1 e-book 978-0-375-99070-0 PLB Series: Teardrop, 2

wishing door that lets a self-conscious lad remodel himself into “Luis 2.0.” Though done in different styles, the art features consistently clean lines, clear colors, easy-to-follow action and individually distinct characters.

Another worthy entry in a series of themed collections that places production and storytelling on equally high pedestals. (Graphic short stories. 7-12)

Seventeen-year-old Eureka Boudreaux’s tears have unleashed a flood of biblical proportions, threatening to drown the whole of the Waking World and paving the way for the rise of Atlantis and its evil ruler, Atlas (Teardrop, 2013).

If only it were that simple. Eureka, her close friend Cat, her family, and her magical sweetheart, Ander, leave behind their flooded Louisiana bayou and make their way to dry land in search of a reclusive Seedbearer who holds the secret to defeating Atlas. In Solon’s subterranean grotto, Eureka comes closer to the truth of her identity and to an understanding of how she can undo the darkness she’s unwittingly released on the world. She also continues to wrestle with her conflicting love for Ander and for her best friend, Brooks, who remains possessed by Atlas. Unfortunately, what was once a compelling love triangle feels much less so this time around, partially due to the fact that Eureka’s encounters with Brooks are much fewer and farther between. This sequel as a whole is waterlogged, sodden with new characters and choked with plotlines that dampen the tension, dilute the romance and threaten to leave readers scratching their heads instead of turning the pages.

While some of the previous book’s fans will appreciate knowing what happens next, many will wish they’d left it up to their own imaginations. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

THE HIDDEN DOORS

Kibuishi, Kazu—Ed. Amulet/Abrams (128 pp.) $19.95 | $10.95 paper | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-4197-0882-4 978-1-4197-0884-8 paper Series: Explorer Enticing doorways give these seven new graphic shorts a common element.

These doors range in nature from physical barriers, such as one concealing a lonely mummy’s treasure in Johane Matte’s “Mastaba,” to a psychological threshold over which intrepid Asteria Crane in editor Kibuishi’s story of the same name passes to enter a young patient’s subconscious. In each tale, they lead sometimes to comical adventures, sometimes to life- (or, for the mummy, death-) changing experiences. An uncertain magician gains new confidence making soup in a “Giant’s Kitchen,” (Jason Caffoe), Faith Erin Hicks’ “Two-Person Door” leads a would-be hero to adventure without his even opening it, and Jen Wang offers a |

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RAIN FOREST COLORS

Lawler, Janet Photos by Laman, Tim National Geographic Kids (32 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-4263-1733-0 Stunning animal photos introduce children to 10 basic colors in this latest from National Geographic Kids.

From the brilliant blue Ulysses butterfly and yellow orb weaver spider to the scarlet ibis and purple honeycreeper, the colors of these animals are never in doubt, and the photos get readers so close that the scales on the iguana are visible, as are the hairs and bumps on the fiddler crab. Highlighting animals found in the rain forest, each spread features a single creature, its color in a large and matching type at the top, the animal’s name below in the same color along with a brief paragraph that gives a few facts and asks a question of readers (which it then answers): “What do you think the cockatoo is doing?” “Did You Know” boxes on each spread provide another fact. “At night an orangutan bends branches to make a bed high in the trees.”

Backmatter includes a spread of fast facts about each of the featured animals (home, size, food, predators, young), a map showing the locations of rain forests around the world as well as where each picture was taken, a “Color Quiz,” a note from the photographer, a glossary and a list of resources for finding out more.

Readers will not only practice their colors, they’ll get an inkling of what a colorful and wonderful world we live in. (Informational picture book. 2-8)

FORBIDDEN

Little, Kimberley Griffiths Harper/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-219497-8 978-0-06-219500-5 e-book A Mesopotamian girl seeks love in the 18th century B.C. In a tribe of desert nomads whose names come primarily from the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon, a 15-year-old hilariously named Jayden prepares for an unwanted betrothal. It’s the time of Hammurabi, and Jayden, “a daughter of Abraham,” is to wed loathsome Horeb, heir to the throne of |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Christopher Paul Curtis The Newbery and Coretta Scott King winner’s new novel is a subtle coming-of-age adventure story

By Gordon West

Photo courtesy Daniel Syphax Harris

There’s an expectation you have when reading a book by Christopher Paul Curtis. He tells a fictional story rooted in history, and the expectation is that he’ll bring depth, emotion and relevance to bear in a timeline that might otherwise be regarded twodimensionally. His Elijah of Buxton put a spotlight on Buxton, Canada, and the first child born free in a town settled by former slaves. Like any enthusiastic writer fully entrenched in the lives of his characters, Curtis didn’t want to bid adieu to Elijah. Rather than revisit the character with a hard sequel, he’s publishing The Madman of Piney Woods. It is 40 years later, and Elijah is on the periphery of an adventure story centered on two boys, two monsters and one point in history replete with Curtis’ signature heart, historical accuracy and vivid imagery.

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Madman is a dual narrative told from the perspectives of 13-year-olds Benji and Red. Benji, an aspiring journalist, is the eldest of three African-Canadian children growing up in Buxton. Red, a descendant of Irish immigrants, is an intellectual living in nearby Chatham with his father and tyrannical Grandmother O’Toole, who is more abrasive than affectionate.

The boys, who don’t meet (and then forge an unlikely friendship) until Chapter 22, weren’t intended to share narrative responsibility.

“When I started writing the book, I really wanted it to be about the echoes of violence and of slavery,” says Curtis. “I started writing it just as a book for Benji—Benji was the only narrator. And then during research, I found out about the coffin ships from Ireland and of the hell that so many Irish people went through once they got to the United States and to Canada….And as I got hold of Red, then I started to become more interested in what he is. And I thought about his upbringing and of his grandmother and what she would be.”

What she would be is someone frightening, volatile and monstrous. Diminutive in stature, her colossal threat to the physical and mental well-being of Red keeps him flinching (he’s on the receiving end of plenty of her smacks and wallops). Her spitting insults at townsfolk against whom she holds longstanding grudges only exacerbate his anxiety and frustration with her. She is a survivor of the coffin ships (quarantined ships of Irish immigrants) and, as it is eventually revealed, witnessed the deaths of most of her family to plague and famine and to the bigotry toward Irish immigrants in North America. Even still, Red is terrified of her and would like nothing more than to have her institutionalized. As far as he’s concerned, she’s a monster in plain sight. kirkus.com

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There’s a hidden monster too, one with whom both boys are familiar before they even meet: the Madman. Some say he has snakes for hair, others say he is 8 feet tall and shackled in gold chains. Everyone agrees that he’s a loner, choosing seclusion in the woods over the social center of town. His past is at first a mystery and, when confessed, is not dissimilar from Grandmother O’Toole’s in its brutality and heartache. And yet, the Madman isn’t the mythical monster he’s made out to be at all. He is kind, gentle and calm.

“It boils down to both of them [Grandmother O’Toole and the Madman] are suffering from posttraumatic stress,” says Curtis. “Different people are exposed to different situations and react in different ways. And Grandmother O’Toole became bitter and angry about the things that she was exposed to, while the Madman of Piney Woods became more introspective. You can learn from the situation or you can let it destroy you. As I’ve gotten older, I see that a lot of times, people who go through these horrible situations, some of the time these people learn from the situation how to treat other people, and they become much like whatever was oppressing them. And on the other hand, sometimes people go through these situations and you learn forgiveness from it.”

Here Curtis references Nelson Mandela, someone from whom one might expect bitterness. But Mandela decided to end a cycle of negativity, to work toward reconciliation and forgiveness. Fear not, though: The Madman of Piney Woods isn’t a didactic read. The lesson of reconciliation and an illustration of the commonalities that bind us all are subtly revealed in a coming-of-age adventure story. The pages aren’t annals of stark lessons and forced ideals; they’re stocked with a hearty story and a glimpse of history to be savored.

“History books are one thing, and they by nature have to be—I don’t want to say bland, but there can’t be much of the human emotion in it,” says Curtis.

“It’s supposed to be a retelling of things as they are even though it’s all for naught. It’s always biased in one way or the other. In its purest form, it’s supposed to be a recitation of facts. When I’m telling the story from the point of view of a little girl or a little boy, then emotion can come into play, and you can look at a situation and understand the impact that it has on people and on their emotions.” In other words, writ|

ing a fictionalized account gives a writer the opportunity to present different depths and perspectives that aren’t prevalent in Dewey Decimal’s 900 section.

Benji is a keen observer, as you’d expect from a burgeoning journalist. A recurring gimmick throughout the book is his often comical headlines in response to his own predicaments, like The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men Might Go Wrong, But a WellThought-Out Scheme Never Does. I ask Curtis what Benji’s headline for Madman would be.

He chuckles and says, “Frightened Author Nervously Awaits Reaction to New Book.”

Gordon West is a writer and illustrator in Brooklyn. He is at work on a teen novel and a picture book.

The Madman of Piney Woods received a starred review in the July 1, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

The Madman of Piney Woods Curtis, Christopher Paul Scholastic (384 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-545-15664-6

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her tribe. Horeb, selfish and lazy, abandons Jayden in her deepest tragedy, but mysterious Kadesh appears out of the desert to aid her. Even Jayden’s older sister, Leila, sees which way the wind is blowing, telling Jayden, “Horeb might be your future husband, but Kadesh is the handsome stranger who can’t take his eyes off you.” Meanwhile, Leila is thinking about abandoning the ways of their fathers for the comforts of the Temple of Ashtoreth, giving Jayden plenty of opportunity to moralize at her sister about the wickedness of priestess practices (though Jayden herself is not quite clear what’s so evil about it). When everything goes wrong (mostly because of Horeb’s cackling villainy, invisible to all but Jayden), it’s the people Jayden judges and finds wanting who rescue her—not that their kindness changes her opinions. Readers looking for blandly re-created historical settings that are less anachronistic than this would be better served by Esther Friesner’s Princesses of Myth series.

The setup for a sequel doesn’t entice. (Historical fiction.

12-14)

RUNNING OUT OF NIGHT

Lovejoy, Sharon Delacorte (304 pp.) $16.99 | $7.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-385-74409-6 978-0-385-37846-8 e-book 978-0-375-99147-9 PLB Lively characterization and an intimate portrait of the natural world enrich this tale of an abused white girl in antebellum Virginia who shelters, then joins an enslaved runaway in search of freedom.

Known only as “girl” to Pa and her brothers, the narrator leads a life that makes Cinderella’s seem like a sinecure. Joining Zenobia, who’s seen her own family separated and sold, isn’t a hard call. Their journey, closely pursued by Pa and others determined to find the runaway and collect the large reward, is harrowing—also empowering. Life as a drudge has given Lark, as Zenobia names her, the practical skill set they’ll need to evade thunderstorms, copperheads and slave hunters, among other antagonists. They find allies, too: other runaways and an abolitionist Quaker community. Lark’s vivid and compelling, her dialect convincing. Lovejoy’s sometimes-quirky knowledge of local history and extraordinary gift for writing about nature flavor the story, lending authenticity to Lark’s closely observed world and informing the ingenious plot. One issue is troubling: Readers are invited throughout to compare the girls, to see Lark’s pre-escape life as no better than slavery, an analog to it. While suggesting equivalency might help white readers identify with black characters, this device subtly downplays the enormous differences in their statuses in a society whose economy, laws and culture rested on those differences.

Lush, detailed, total-immersion storytelling. (author note, glossary) (Historical fiction. 9-12)

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THREE LITTLE OWLS

Luzzati, Emanuele Illus. by Blake, Quentin Translated by Yeoman, John Tate/Abrams (32 pp.) $18.95 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-84976-080-5

The irrepressible Blake supplies illustrations for Yeoman’s English translation of the late Luzzati’s rhyming verses, “Filastrocca di Natale.”

The refrain is infectiously nonsensical: “With a bop and a bip and a bip and a bop/ A wardrobe with three little owls on the top. / And each of the three has decided to lay / A shiny white egg as it’s Christmas today.” The three loosely drawn pen-andink owls are differentiated by different wash colors, slightly different body types and appealing tufts on the bluish owl. They are a friendly trio, staring out from the page with large, round white eyes and clutching their individual eggs with sturdy, fingerlike feathers. Underneath is the hint of a wooden wardrobe.

Blake’s trademark artwork continues to delight, as he shows the owls in their odd party garb; one is “wearing a gigantic vase for a hat.” Before setting off on a year’s journey that takes them around the world, the owls pull from a barrel a most unusual and learned fish, depicted in a whimsical double-page spread. While the “bops” and “bips” of the rhyme keep the youngest viewers happy, older children will enjoy such absurdities as the fish fretting about getting wet. The owls’ return to England coincides with Christmas, giving the book some holiday appeal as well.

Happy nonsense that feels very British despite its Italian origins. (Picture book. 2-5)

WHAT FOREST KNOWS

Lyon, George Illus. by Hall, August Atheneum (40 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 18, 2014 978-1-4424-6775-0

An extended poetic appreciation for what goes on in a forest through the seasons.

“Forest knows waiting,...Forest knows waking,...Forest knows growing,...[and] Forest knows gathering in.” This lyrical tribute makes note of the changing textures, colors, animals and activities in this beautiful, mysterious world. From buds and birds to moles and centipedes, there is much to see at any time of the year. Hall’s painterly Photoshop illustrations, some created over actual photographs, match the poem’s mood. Often hazy, just beyond the edge of realistic, they give the impression that there’s still more to be seen. And there is. Parts of an exploring dog appear in each image—coming into the picture or just leaving, hidden behind a tree or partially obscured by a deer’s leg. Only toward the end is the whole (and wholly enthusiastic) dog revealed, as well as the child who accompanies it through the forest. Then a double-page spread closes in on the dog’s face, which totally expresses its joy at exploring this world

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“A high-speed thriller elevated by its unflinching focus on the harrowing effects of online bullying.” from watched

of interesting smells. “Forest knows everything belongs. / YOU, too.” The final page turn invites readers to appreciate this walk through a forest year as much as the poet does.

Lyon’s ability to see the connections among things and her affection for the natural world, amply demonstrated in earlier works, shine through this latest offering. (Picture book. 3- 7)

WATCHED

Lyons, C.J. Sourcebooks Fire (320 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-8548-6 978-1-4926-0911-7 paper After suffering unthinkable trauma at the hands of an online criminal mastermind, two teens join forces to fight back.

Jesse leads a life dictated by King, a stranger who watches his every move and forces him to commit unspeakable acts for his wealthy online clientele. King is a “capper,” capturing other people’s explicit online media and using it as blackmail. After the disappearance of Jesse’s father years ago, Jesse and his family have lived with his uncle. But soon, Jesse’s uncle began abusing him, quickly dragging him into the sordid online underworld ruled

by King. Now King insists that Jesse recruit young boys to put on shows for clients, “or else”: He’ll murder Jesse’s little sister.

As his already suffocating world closes in on him, Jesse receives a package from Miranda, another teen caught in King’s web, who claims she wants to help. The two of them join forces and begin searching for the man behind the screen that’s destroyed their lives. Lyons sets a bleak stage riddled with perversion and violence. Though it’s a cinematic thriller, the focus on the timely issues of online harassment, abuse and suicide set it apart.

Unfortunately, the ending rushes in with none of the emotional resolution readers will want so badly for Jesse and Miranda.

A high-speed thriller elevated by its unflinching focus on the harrowing effects of online bullying. (Thriller. 14-18)

UNTIL THE DAY ARRIVES

Machado, Ana Maria Translated by Springer, Jane Groundwood (152 pp.) $16.95 | $14.95 e-book | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-55498-455-8 978-1-55498-457-2 e-book In the early 17th century, two hauntingly plague-orphaned Portuguese siblings flee their village for Lisbon, only to encounter more vicissitudes before reaching a safer haven in Brazil.

Manu and Bento exhibit strong loyalty to each other, and they adhere faithfully to their Roman Catholic upbringing. For most |

of the story, 11-year-old Manu, a girl, poses as a boy for safety’s sake, a device that both furthers the plot and may help readers believe the siblings’ feminist, anti-racist and anti-slavery values that, however sympathetic, seem more in sync with 21st-century progressive values than those of their own time. The third-person narrative is mostly told from Manu’s point of view, but it also follows captured Africans—in grim, realistic detail—to their eventual relationships with Manu and Bento. When Bento falls in love with the African slave Rosa, and Manu befriends both the African slave Didi and the indigenous boy Caiubi, the siblings learn about quilombos—settlements of runaway slaves—and put their abolitionist values into action. In Springer’s translation, Machado’s story is sometimes hindered by stilted, patronizing or sentimental passages. Didactic interludes provide contextual information about such complex subjects as Portuguese/Brazilian history and the trans-Atlantic slave trade; these are augmented by a helpful editorial note and glossary.

Despite awkward moments, the tale offers vivid descriptions, an intriguing plot and a setting not often seen in North American literature for children. (Historical fiction. 10-13)

TIPTOP CAT

Mader, C. Roger Illus. by Mader, C. Roger HMH Books (40 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 18, 2014 978-0-544-14799-7 A Parisian tale inspired by a real-life feline.

An unnamed black-and-white cat is given to a (mostly unseen) girl as a gift. Balloons, ribbons and confetti suggest a birthday may be involved, but the focus shifts immediately to the cat as he inspects his new surroundings and makes himself at home. In a series of nearly wordless panels, he checks out cozy spots to nap, perch or hide and experiments with climbing. First it’s furniture (the bathroom sink, an armoire), then he ventures outside and jumps from the balcony to the neighboring roof and beyond. The cityscape reveals that the cat lives in Paris, which may or may not resonate with young readers, depending on whether they recognize the Eiffel Tower. A chance encounter with a pigeon results in an accident that wounds the cat’s pride and curbs his excursions until a second unexpected meeting with an avian interloper restores his sense of adventure. Small touches of humor reward careful observation. Mader’s use of multiple panels interspersed with doublepage spreads provides a sense of momentum, but the brevity of the text can feel choppy, particularly when paired with the relatively static pastel illustrations.

Despite believable action and attractive pictures, this feels more like an amusing anecdote than a full-fledged adventure. (Picture book. 4- 7)

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“Though the narratives are all written in the same style and voice, they relate individually distinct tales of girls courageously speaking out and setting their eyes on the prize….” from because i am a girl

THOMAS PAINE Crusader for Liberty: How One Man’s Ideas Helped Form a New Nation

Marrin, Albert Knopf (176 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-375-86674-6 978-0-375-96674-3 PLB

This exploration of Thomas Paine and his passionate writings in support of liberty provides insight into a turbulent period of change in the United States, England and France.

Thomas Paine left 18th-century England with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia as his destination. Before long, Paine had a job as an editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, and his life as a passionate writer of ideals was launched. Turning his initial focus from abolition to independence, Paine wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet that would make him a sensation and change the face of political writing.

“He wrote for the common people, those like him. To influence them, he had to grab their attention by appealing to their intelligence and to their emotions.” After supporting American independence, Paine turned his attention to the French Revolution, publishing The Rights of Man and landing himself in prison.

Upon release, he began work on another controversial treatise, The Age of Reason, in which he criticized organized religion, especially Christianity. In a clear, straightforward narrative illustrated with archival images, Marrin provides the necessary context for readers to appreciate Paine’s impact and the role he has played in the concept of “American exceptionalism.” While it deliberately focuses on his ideas, there is still a clear picture of the man behind them.

A valuable aid in understanding a historical period that continues to resonate. (notes, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 10-16)

THE OLIVE TREE

Marston, Elsa Illus. by Ewart, Claire Wisdom Tales (32 pp.) $16.95 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-937786-29-8

The tree, after all, belongs to her family. One fateful night, lightning strikes the tree, and it crashes to the ground, bringing part of the wall down as well (symbolically and literally). An apt peace offering if ever there was one, the broken olive branches bring Sameer and Muna together. Marston’s understated text aptly captures the children’s feelings and their uneasy relationship. Ewart’s illustrations are not as strong; in close-up, they are pleasing, but uneven perspective and confusing composition dog some of the longer shots, particularly those that depict the toppled tree.

Uneven art aside, a valid story that shows how perceived prejudice can be just as destructive as actual hatred.

(Picture book. 5-8)

BECAUSE I AM A GIRL

McCarney, Rosemary with Albaugh, Jen & Plan International Second Story Press (96 pp.) $17.95 paper | Oct. 11, 2014 978-1-927583-44-9 Girl Power in the Third World and elsewhere.

Presented in support of the “Because I am a Girl” initiative, which was co-founded by McCarney under the aegis of the international children’s aid organization Plan, this takes as its foundation the organization’s eight-point manifesto. The book offers a mix of uplifting personal testimonials and disquieting statistics on girls’ education, forced marriage and slavery in, mostly, developing countries. Color photos aplenty depict girls and young women—most identified by a first name that is changed at need for their protection—in dozens of countries (Canada included) working, going to school or posing with confident smiles. Though the narratives are all written in the same style and voice, they relate individually distinct tales of girls courageously speaking out and setting their eyes on the prize of an education in the face of family responsibilities, extreme poverty, sexual assault and other obstacles. Readers inspired to pledge direct or indirect support (or, for that matter, check the statistics) will have to look elsewhere for advice and leads to further information, but the urgency of the cause and the triumphs of these small victories are compellingly expressed.

A clear call for change as well as a chorus of affirmation that change is possible. (Nonfiction. 11-14)

Sameer, a young boy in Lebanon, awaits the return of his neighbors who fled during the war.

Sameer doesn’t remember the family, but maybe there will be a boy his age. A boy he can play with—especially someone who can climb the olive tree that grows between the two homes. The conflict is unexplained, just touched upon briefly: “The family who had lived there had gone away during the troubles, because they were different from most of the people in the village.” Unfortunately, there is not a boy playmate but a girl named Muna who does not like Sameer very much. She sees him picking the olives that have fallen on his side of the wall and declares he is stealing.

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STRONGHEART The World’s First Movie Star Dog McCully, Emily Arnold Illus. by McCully, Emily Arnold Henry Holt (40 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-8050-9448-0

Caldecott medalist McCully sheds light on a forgotten pioneer. |

Growing up in World War I Germany, Etzel von Oeringen—later known as “Strongheart”—is trained as a police dog. After the war, he’s discarded and sent to a kennel in the United States, where he’s found by Hollywood screenwriter Jane and her director husband, Larry. When Larry abruptly enters the yard of the kennel, Etzel attacks. Understandably frightened, Jane screams and runs, but her unmannerly husband demands she, “HALT AND KEEP STILL!”—a directive followed by both Jane and Etzel. Given McCully’s penchant for illustrating stories about strong girls and women, it’s particularly confusing that Larry’s disturbing behavior isn’t examined. Larry believes Etzel can act if he can learn to relax, which Larry “teaches” by pushing Etzel over repeatedly and shouting, “Play!” If readers can endure the unlikable owner and struggle through the halting pace, they’ll learn of Strongheart’s rise to fame to become a well-loved screen star. McCully uses bright colors to offset the muted tones of Strongheart’s coat, but so much vibrancy can be distracting.

While it’s laudable that McCully has ensured this story isn’t lost to the annals of history, it’s not her strongest visual or written work. (Picture book. 6-10)

BEAU, LEE, THE BOMB & ME

McKinley, Mary Kteen (256 pp.) $9.95 paper | Oct. 28, 2014 978-1-61773-255-3

A road trip from Seattle to San Francisco yields friendship and the best uncles ever.

When 16-year-old Rusty sees new boy Beau appear at her school, she’s relieved— he’ll be “fresh meat” for the bullies who torment Rusty for being fat. She’s right; they paint “Die Fag” on Beau’s locker and beat him up. Desperate, he decides to run away in search of his gay uncle in San Francisco. Rusty goes with him, as does Lee, a girl who’s sex-shamed at school and happens to be sleeping with a teacher. Their road trip is a patchwork of West Coast travelogue (including both nature appreciation and Twilight chatter when they visit Forks, Washington) and snappy narration. The teens’ growing fondness for one another is more believable than Rusty’s voice, which sometimes feels forced in its snark and is peppered with a hodgepodge of references: David Bowie and Byrne, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Macklemore, SpongeBob. Most textured are Beau’s uncle Frankie and his acerbic partner, Oscar, in San Francisco. The uncles bring complexity, realism and AIDS history into a text that’s otherwise entertaining but too quick to sum up emotional points (“Sometimes your soul decides who your family is, not just your DNA”).

Pair this love letter to the West Coast and to the victims and survivors of the gay American AIDS crisis with David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing (2013). (Fiction. 13-16)

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WILD ROVER NO MORE Being the Last Recorded Account of the Life & Times of Jacky Faber

Meyer, L.A. HMH Books (368 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-544-21777-5

Plucky piratical orphan Jacky Faber relies on luck and skill to avoid hanging—yet again—in this 12th and, sadly, final book of the stellar Bloody Jack series, published posthumously.

The 19-year-old previously fled Boston and foreswore men after she was publicly whipped by her (disguised) love interest, James “Jaimy” Fletcher (Boston Jacky, 2013). Here, she returns to the city only to face false charges of treason. Setting sail, she first lands in nearby Plymouth and serves as governess to a bloodthirsty Edgar Allen Polk (the future poet Poe), then joins the circus—a logical if belated career move. Thanks to her prior extraordinary but well-plotted encounters with rogues, royals and other historical figures of the turn of the 19th century, Jacky has friends and enemies everywhere (and mentions nearly all of them in her nostalgic moments), and she soon faces the hangman with trademark gallows humor. Jacky is a complicated protagonist, unchanging—always stubborn, entrepreneurial, flirtatious and quick to cross-dress—and in constant motion, and she’s a shameless self-promoter (with help from her publisher and friend, Amy Trevelyne), marked with scars and tattoos, who now needs anonymity. Meyer adheres to his effective and enjoyable formula, offering an impressively accomplished heroine, suspense as taut as a hangman’s rope and a satisfying conclusion.

A solid and sentimental entry in an underrated series.

(Historical fiction. 14 & up)

ONCE A SHEPHERD

Millard, Glenda Illus. by Lesnie, Phil Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-7636-7458-8

Millard and Lesnie, Australians, present a picture book about the Great War with beautiful, green-dominated watercolors and a spare text with occasional end rhymes.

Tom Shepherd tends his sheep, and his red-haired wife, Cherry, spins and weaves his wool—but then she finds she must make him a greatcoat of it to wear to war. (The endpapers are the very weave of the coat.) Tom goes from his pregnant wife and his sheep to the horrors of the front, where he loses his life trying to assist an enemy soldier. That blond soldier, left with only one leg, journeys to Cherry to tell her of Tom’s bravery and to bring her his coat, which she makes into a cuddle-toy lamb

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for their little son. The hope for peace on the last page seems particularly knotty in today’s world, and one might certainly question the why of a picture book about the horrific losses of war for children so young. But it is done with truth and tenderness. “Once Tom’s darling sewed a greatcoat, / and she buttoned it with brass. / She stitched each seam with tenderness and lined it with her love. / Once she prayed to heaven above.”

Taken together, the folkloric simplicity of the text and the quiet beauty of the illustrations pack a powerful punch for those families that want—or need—to confront wartime violence with their little ones. (Picture book. 4-8)

SUSPICION

Monir, Alexandra Delacorte (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Dec. 23, 2014 978-0-385-74389-1 978-9-385-37250-3 e-book 978-0-375-99136-3 PLB This omnibus paranormal/mystery/ suspense/romance follows as many gothic memes as possible within a modern setting.

New Yorker Imogen, 17, inherits an English dukedom, which embroils her in a centuries-old mystery. During childhood visits, she fell in love with Lord Sebastian Stanhope. He, however, became attached to her cousin Lucia in the interim.

But now Lucia has died, making orphaned Imogen the only remaining heir. Imogen appears to be the direct descendant of Lady Beatrice, hanged as a witch in the early 1800s (some 150 or so years after the last recorded witch hanging in England, but who cares about historical accuracy when there is a trope to exploit?). The young duchess has inherited her progenitor’s supernatural power to grow flowers in an instant, among other useful abilities. She must also contend with such genre staples as the cold and intimidating housekeeper and her daughter, the nasty maid. A murder mystery explodes into the plot; can Imogen use her powers to unravel the mystery? Unfortunately, the entire effort is rife with clichés. In keeping with the genre, all protagonists are extraordinarily beautiful/handsome, all major characters are titled, and the palatial mansion has four turrets and a supernatural garden maze.

A simplistic entry in the genre for undemanding fans of Downton Abbey. (Paranormal romance. 12-18)

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MISTER HORIZONTAL & MISS VERTICAL

Noémie, Révah Illus. by Zagnoli, Olimpia Enchanted Lion Books (48 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 22, 2014 978-1-59270-161-2 Inspired by a photograph showing a family of three, the man wearing horizontal stripes, the woman vertical, and the child a checkered shirt, this whimsical debut picture book challenges the limits of ultradesigned books for children.

The characteristics and preferences of the pinheaded protagonists are illustrated in bold geometric black and white on strong, flat background colors. Mister Horizontal, predictably, loves the smooth, gliding motions of rollerblading and sailing. Miss Vertical prefers dizzying aerial adventures; she “loves launching herself into orbit and looping through the air.” Mister Horizontal likes to bend and stretch, (which action confusingly causes his stripes to be vertical on the page.) Miss Vertical, the thrill seeker, loves high-wire acrobatics, elevators, bungee jumping, rockets, skyscrapers and balloons. Mister Horizontal, more down-to-earth, prefers the desert, the ocean, ants marching in straight lines, lounging, napping and gardening. The book’s ulterior motive is suddenly revealed at the end, in a question: “Now what do you think... / ...their child will love?” And there is their child, wearing a checkered shirt, just like the boy in a closing photo. Witty, clever, elegantly designed but certainly not touchy-feely, this book is a somewhat strained synthesis of graphic illustration, seemingly designed to teach the concept of orientation in conjunction with an analysis of personality traits.

Eye-catching though it is, it is unlikely to displace more traditional, warmer offerings on this subject. (Picture book.

5-8)

BIRD CAT DOG

Nordling, Lee Illus. by Bosch, Meritxell Graphic Universe (40 pp.) $6.95 paper | $25.26 PLB | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-4523-9 978-1-4677-4522-2 PLB Series: Three Story Books A serene suburban tableau cleverly describes the separate, exciting adventures of a bird, a cat and a dog, each the hero of its own story.

In one of these stories, a lemon-yellow bird seeks freedom from its cage and finds itself encountering fierce raptors and a curious cat. In a neighboring backyard, an orange cat craves adventure outside of its fence, meeting a wily feral opponent.

Nearby, a tough-looking gray dog strives to guard its doghouse from intruders and maintain peace. Readers, be advised, don’t let the seemingly simple, wordless nature of this offering fool you: This innovative charmer can be read four different ways.

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“…Grayson’s journey is portrayed with gentleness and respect, and readers will root for the show to go on.” from gracefully grayson

There is the bird’s story, soaring across the top panels in bright, cheerful azure tones, which can be read alone. Similarly, there are the cat’s escapades, creeping across the middle panels against a richly verdant palette, and the dog’s tale, in ochre, earth tones, marching across the bottom. Each animal’s adventure could be read individually, or all three could be read traditionally, left to right and then top to bottom, following each of the nine panels that occupy most of the pages. Multiple readings are not only expected, they are required.

Stylish and inventive and an excellent examination of point of view. (Graphic adventure. 4-8)

THE LITTLE MOON RAVEN

Pfister, Marcus Illus. by Pfister, Marcus Translated by Bishop, Kathryn Minedition (32 pp.) $19.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-988-8240-81-4

A tiny, weak raven is so determined to win the friendship of the other ravens that he puts himself in harm’s way.

Even when he develops prodigious flying skills, he cannot win acceptance. The other ravens dare him to fly to the moon, claiming they have all accomplished this feat. Although he tries with all his might and nearly reaches his goal, he falls to Earth, spent and in despair at his failure. One of the bullies who saw the flight (or perhaps dreamt it) admits the trick and begs forgiveness. As they join together to fly and play, they notice that the little raven has one mysterious, shining silver feather as a souvenir of his brave attempt. The regretful bully, now much older and wiser, tells the tale long after the events have been almost forgotten by the other ravens. This perspective allows readers to reflect on the effect bullying can have on both the perpetrator and the victim, albeit in an earnest, best-case scenario in which there is no lasting damage and great moral lessons are learned. Except for the mystical moon flight, Pfister’s effective, compelling illustrations depict the ravens flying or perched on branches against stark white backgrounds, while the moon, the raven’s wings and one feather shine in raised silver metallic foil.

An important idea handled gently and tenderly if a little simplistically. (Picture book. 4-8)

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THE LAST CHANGELING

Pitcher, Chelsea Flux (360 pp.) $11.99 paper | Nov. 8, 2014 978-0-7387-4084-3

A faerie princess on a quest falls for an appealing teen who’s grieving a recent loss.

The Bright Queen’s riddle sends her after a “leader of men” into the human world, where, to evade enemies from the Dark Court, she changes places with a dead girl. A changeling, she encounters Taylor, 17, and accepts his offer of refuge.

Estranged from his parents following his brother’s death, he now lives above the family’s garage. He’s equally alienated at school despite his good looks and soccer prowess, but Elora’s arrival changes everything. In alternating narration, they chronicle their deepening mutual attraction. At night, she recounts her story, disguised as a fairy tale, but keeps her quest a secret. By day, they attend his high school, where Elora enrolls as a transfer student and continues her search, since Taylor doesn’t fit her specifications. (The homophobic jerk on his soccer team’s another story.) They find kindred spirits among the gay-straight alliance’s smart, appealing social outcasts. It’s a combustible combination—in a good way. If the plotting’s occasionally farfetched and Elora’s story and character a tad derivative, Taylor compensates. Not your standard-issue, paranormal-romance hero, he’s a believable teen with a sense of humor who doesn’t notice his room’s messy until a girl sees it.

A series opener with appeal for fantasy fans, especially those at home with faerie conventions (think Seelie and Unseelie courts). (Fantasy. 13-18)

GRACEFULLY GRAYSON

Polonsky, Ami Hyperion (256 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-8527-7

Sixth-grader Grayson realizes a dream but attracts controversy by taking the role of the female lead in the school play.

When Grayson was younger, it was easier to look in the mirror and see “the long shining golden gown and the girl inside of it.” Now, in sixth grade, “[m]y imagination doesn’t work like it used to.” (The book’s first-person narration neatly avoids the problem of choosing gendered pronouns for Grayson, who is perceived as male by classmates but whose identity as female sharpens over the course of the novel.) The story takes time to get started: Grayson gains and then loses her first new friend in years; then Grayson’s grandmother dies; and then, about a quarter of the way in, the school-play plot that quickly becomes central begins. Grayson’s doodles of princesses and daydreams of skirts sometimes feel a clumsily obvious way to indicate that

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gender is the issue here. In fact, many characters feel more like stand-ins for certain ideas (Grayson’s aunt’s resistance to Grayson playing Persephone, Grayson’s younger cousin’s childlike insistence that “[i]t’s just a play”) than fully imagined people.

Still, Grayson’s journey is portrayed with gentleness and respect, and readers will root for the show to go on.

A kind and earnest look at a young transgender adolescent’s experience. (Fiction. 10-14)

THE US CONGRESS FOR KIDS Over 200 Years of Lawmaking, Deal-Breaking, and Compromising, With 21 Activities Reis, Ronald A. Chicago Review (144 pp.) $16.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-61374-977-7 Series: For Kids

The latest installment of the For Kids series examines the history and functions of the United States Congress.

Noting low approval ratings Congress receives from many Americans, Reis encourages readers to see what an amazing institution Congress is, pointing out its role in overthrowing slavery, giving women the right to vote, making strides in civil rights and challenging executive branch authority. Chapter 1—“Unfinished Business: Congress and Slavery”—opens with a lively account of Preston Brooks’ attack on Sen. Charles Sumner on the eve of the Civil War, and following chapters continue the focus on volatile issues facing Congress and American society since our government’s founding—creating the judicial system, enacting the Bill of Rights, seeking a policy on immigration, impeaching presidents and investigating potential dangers to American society. Unfortunately, this volume, like others in the series, is trapped by its “For Kids” formula, as the historical content is well-suited for an older, middle school audience while many of the activities are for younger kids: Create your own “Congressional Money,” make a capital for a Capitol column using paper-towel cores and yogurt cups, and create a Capitol dome using toothpicks and gumdrops. Backmatter includes an excellent guide to websites for kids, and the bibliography notes books suitable for young readers.

A well-written, extensive history that doesn’t seem to know its audience. (afterword, source notes, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 9-14)

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GIRLS VS. GUYS Surprising Differences Between the Sexes

Rosen, Michael J. Twenty-First Century/Lerner (72 pp.) $33.27 PLB | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-1610-9 PLB Bite-sized pieces of scientific research seek to illuminate the gender gap.

Taking a mostly humorous approach, Rosen examines the stereotypes that paint men as the ones who never ask for directions and women as the ones who talk all the time. Some of these stereotypes turn out to be rooted in biology and can be demonstrated scientifically, such as how room temperature affects how men and women learn. Others are more a product of society and culture, such as women smiling more than men due to sex roles in the media. Each stereotype is covered in a short, two-page spread, featuring full-color photos and well-written text that doesn’t try too hard to be cool. In a few instances, Rosen doesn’t make enough of a connection between nature and nurture, though—like not pointing out the societal impact of boys’ demonstrated tendency to equate girls with power tools when looking them at the beach. Without going deeper into these stereotypes, this title remains on the surface.

Readers will learn some basic facts about sex differences, but it’ll take some extra leaps on their parts to connect all the dots to understand just what it all means. (source notes, selected bibliography, further resources, index) (Nonfiction. 12-14)

COMING HOME

Ruth, Greg Illus. by Ruth, Greg Feiwel & Friends (32 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-250-05547-7 A nearly wordless picture book chronicles the wait for reunion after a troop plane lands.

The first spread shows a pregnant woman, a dog and one blond boy, all evidently unrelated. The boy waits to find his soldier in the crowd, his face full of expectation. The foreground is colored in, while the background images are translucent, allowing young readers to focus on a few of the stories. First, the dog tackles its owner, a young female soldier. Soon, a male soldier kisses a waiting woman. Another tenderly regards the pregnant woman’s belly. The boy runs among the embracing families, looking for his soldier. He regards the kissing and hugging with age-appropriate disdain and continues his search. When it’s clear that most people have found one another, his face is worried, nearly tearful. A small grin turns into a celebratory “MOM!” and soon he is caught up in a welcome hug of his own.

Most spreads contain just one or two words that tie the illustrations together. A lengthy, unnecessary author’s note sounds a dissonant note against the concise, carefully worded story. The

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“Dutch artist Schaapman’s extraordinary construction, 6 feet wide and towering nearly 10 feet tall, plays the deservedly starring role here….” from the mouse mansion

dust jacket borders on maudlin, with the boy saluting a plane while standing next to the waiting dog, and confusingly implies a relationship.

Though it’s on the manipulative side, it should be helpful for children anticipating a parent’s return. (Picture book.

2- 6)

MR. PUTTER & TABBY TURN THE PAGE

Rylant, Cynthia Illus. by Howard, Arthur HMH Books (40 pp.) $14.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-15-206063-3 Series: Mr. Putter & Tabby

The tried-and-true beginning reader series explores the joys of shared reading.

Mr. Putter and Tabby are initially depicted as happy with their placid life, and they spend “their favorite quiet times reading.” When Mr. Putter finds out about a special storytime offered at the local library that invites community members to read with their pets, he is intrigued. This won’t be the same as the solitary shared reading they share at home, but memories of his childhood teacher reading aloud to him in his classroom prompt Mr. Putter to give it a whirl. He shares his plans (and then regrets doing so) with his effervescent neighbor, Mrs. Teaberry, who is the quintessential dog person to Mr. Putter’s calmer, cat-loving self. Ultimately, both pet-and-person pairs deliver successful, albeit quite different storytimes to the children at the library, and they leave with both good memories and good books to share with one another. The simple story is broken up into five short chapters, and Howard’s pencil, watercolor and gouache illustrations successfully reinforce the gentle humor of the story and characterization.

A sweet and nicely different take on the pleasure of reading. (Early reader. 6-8)

THE MOUSE MANSION

Schaapman, Karina Illus. by Schaapman, Karina Dial (64 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 13, 2014 978-0-8037-4049-5

In 17 episodes, two winsome, knitted mice—best friends Sam and Julia—explore the thriving, multistory apartment community where they both live.

Dutch artist Schaapman’s extraordinary construction, 6 feet wide and towering nearly 10 feet tall, plays the deservedly starring role here, as photographed by Ton Bouwer. The two mice’s everyday adventures take them to the recycling room, where they help the Ragman during his weekly pickup, and the bakery, where their dime buys a bagful of delicious if broken |

cookies. They help with Sam’s new triplet siblings as well as the laundry (working together to neatly quell the foamy chaos that results when Julia uses too much soap). Julia lives with her mom; their small apartment’s rough basics contrast with Sam’s extended family’s comfortable digs. Julia’s weeklong bout with chicken pox (the spots are, rather charmingly, embroidered on) illuminates her mother’s loving care. A later visit to Sam’s aunt’s family for dinner on the Jewish Sabbath further expands Julia’s cultural understanding. In turn, Julia’s venturesome nature, steadfast friendship and predilection for “big adventures” help Sam to overcome his shyness and fears. Schaapman’s ingenious miniature interiors are certain to captivate all ages. From tiny wooden toys and well-scaled textiles to Sam’s grandpa’s faded sailor tattoos, the thoroughgoing attention to detail consistently fascinates.

A community in miniature, fully realized and elucidated by sensitive storytelling. (Picture book. 4-8)

HELLO FROM 2030 The Science of the Future and You

Schutten, Jan Paul Translated by Craane, Ilse Beyond Words/Aladdin (224 pp.) $15.99 | $9.99 e-book | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-58270-474-6 978-1-4814-0946-9 e-book

A Belgian import attempts prognostication.

Schutten opens and closes with the dead-cinch prediction that readers in 2030 will laugh at his views on where household tech, sustainable land and water use, medicine and robotics are heading in the near future. In between, he delivers debatable prophecies that microwave ovens will be superseded by unspecified new devices, that computer games will replace most toys and like airy claims. These are embedded in equally superficial surveys of the pros and cons of fossil and alternative energy sources, as well as cautionary looks at environmentally damaging agricultural and lifestyle practices that are in at least the early stages of being addressed. Conversely, he is blindly optimistic about the wonders of “superfoods,” carrying surveillance chips in our bodies and supersmart robots managing our lives. Uncaptioned photos and graphics add lots of color but little content. A closing section of provocative questions, plus endnotes citing news stories, blog posts and other sources of more detailed information, may give would-be futurologists some reward for slogging their ways through.

Readers who want to know when their jet packs and food tablets will be coming will find no answers in this mishmash of eco-sermons and vague allusions to cuttingedge technology. (index) (Nonfiction. 10-12)

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WINTER BEES & OTHER POEMS OF THE COLD

Sidman, Joyce Illus. by Allen, Rick HMH Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-547-90650-8

How do animals survive and thrive in the bitter cold of winter in the northern tundra?

Sidman explains and celebrates their remarkable adaptations in a collection of carefully constructed and delightfully varied poems. The moose calf is naturally built for cold and brags about all his achievements in a lilting, rhyming verse. The tundra swans rest in the marshes and wait for the right time to migrate south as they dream lovely images of their flight.

The winter bees huddle in a warm, humming mass. With lines repeated in the strict organization of a pantoum poem, the beavers dart about in complete silence in the watery space beneath the ice. In dual-voiced verse, the raven and wolf exhort each other to be watchful and successful in their hunting. Other animals, along with trees and snowflakes, take their turns in the stark beauty surrounding them. The final two poems hint at the coming of spring. Fascinating, detailed information about the subjects accompanies each poem. The poems appear on the left, with the factual material on the right of double-page spreads, while Allen’s intricate, unusual and exquisite illustrations take center stage. They are rendered in a combination of media, including large numbers of cut, inked and hand-colored linoleum blocks, which are then digitized and layered; the result is magic.

A work to be savored by young artists and scientists. (glossary) (Informational picture book/poetry. 6-10)

STAR STUFF Carl Sagan and the Mysteries of the Cosmos

Sisson, Stephanie Roth Illus. by Sisson, Stephanie Roth Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-59643-960-3 Young Carl Sagan looks endearingly like his grown-up self, with expressive dark eyebrows and a cheerful look of inquiry, in this warm account of the life of the notable scientist.

Sisson captures an important moment in young Sagan’s life.

In a library, where he has been handed a book on stars, “Carl’s heart beat faster with every page he turned.” The next doublepage spread offers a vertical orientation and a gatefold opening skyward, as if Carl himself were soaring into space. He imagines extraterrestrial life and space travel among the planets—and though he can’t wish himself to Mars, he finds a way to get there in spirit. The text sums this up with brevity: “He studied life and space and became... / ...Dr. Carl Sagan.” Sisson’s economical 118

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narrative and lighthearted illustrations convey Sagan’s regard for the power of imagination and his generous approach to knowledge. She includes the accomplishments for which Sagan will be remembered: his passion for science and space discovery that he shared with the world through his television appearances and the creation and launching of space missions—in particular the Voyager probes, with their recordings of Earth sounds and sights. Abundant backmatter (oddly missing Sagan’s birth date) is compactly delivered in a two-page spread with a list of quotations and sources, a bibliography/resource list and an author’s note.

Both friendly and inspiring—just like its subject. (Picture book/biography. 4-8)

THE YULE TOMTE AND THE LITTLE RABBITS A Christmas Story for Advent Stark, Ulf Illus. by Eriksson, Eva Translated by Beard, Susan Floris (101 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-1-78250-136-7

A winsome Yuletide story translated from the Swedish presents Grump, a tomte, or house gnome, who traditionally brings presents to children.

Grump, however, is as his name implies, fairly grumpy, what with a sleepy bee who needs looking after, his mittens and red hat swept away in the wind, and the sign on his cottage nibbled by a squirrel. Deciding not to celebrate Christmas at all, he retreats to his favorite book, In Praise of Solitude. Meanwhile, two young members of a multigenerational rabbit clan that lives nearby find his hat and the sign. Mystified, they take the items to the other animals of the forest, who tell the rabbits about the tomte and Christmas (not always completely). So the rabbit family decides to prepare for the arrival of the Yule Tomte. There are 25 short chapters in the story, one for each day of Advent, and even though American readers may not know about the Swedish tradition, they will enjoy this bunny family’s sweet anticipation. Two of the more adventurous young bunnies finally bring the tomte to their celebration, and he in turn provides a lovely surprise for all. The illustrations are very much in the softly colored, muted Scandinavian tradition.

Charming. (Picture book. 5-10)

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“So’s rich watercolor illustrations radiate affection between the two….” from noodle magic

THE EXTRAORDINARY MR. QWERTY

range from palm-sized squares to full-page or larger scenes with cutout peepholes, are placed so that the long curves of waves, fish and icy slopes continue uninterrupted no matter which side is up. The visual rises and falls in Little Penguin’s journey create a simple, soothing flow.

A pleasing, low-key dip into the ocean of language as well as water. (Picture book. 4- 6)

Strambini, Karla Illus. by Strambini, Karla Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-7324-6

Imaginative illustrations and spare words present deep themes in this picture book.

Norman Qwerty has ideas that are “far from ordinary.”

Afraid people will think them strange, he hides his ideas under his hat and feels completely alone. But when he creates a contraption that brings ideas to life, Mr. Qwerty realizes that he is not alone after all—everyone has ideas. As others use the contraption to manifest and share their ideas, they create a community that both validates and welcomes the creative diversity.

(An opportunity is lost to add another layer to the diversity theme by visually portraying more diverse skin shades within the characters; only one looks nonwhite.) Strambini’s detailed black-and-white pencil illustrations are filled with Rube Goldberg–like contraptions that resemble fantastical notebook doodles and are saved from monochromatic overwhelm by judiciously placed spots of color. A red-orange cravat identifies Mr. Qwerty, and the cloud-studded sky-blue scarf drifting through the story draws symbolic attention to the necessity of letting imaginations soar. Visual symbolism abounds, and astute readers, noticing something unusual on the title page, will know to pay close attention going forward. The book’s theme is presented subtly; this is a story that rewards multiple readings with multiple layers of understanding.

A picture book that celebrates creativity and imagination...and the courage to share them. (Picture book. 4-8)

UP & DOWN

Teckentrup, Britta Illus. by Teckentrup, Britta Templar/Candlewick (28 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-7129-7 Little Penguin sets out on a preposition-rich swim to visit a friend on a distant iceberg.

Opposites on different sides of glued-in flaps keep the action going. First jumping “high into the air...” Little Penguin then dives “low beneath the waves” to glide past seaweed, through a tunnel, “in front of playful dolphins... / then behind solemn sharks.” Teckentrup mixes in occasional contrasting pairs of adjectives—“Feeling lonely made [Little Penguin’s waiting friend] sad, but... / seeing Little Penguin made her happy!”—and other parts of speech on the way to a culminating “They were together at last!” The digital art is done with a limited palette of dimly lit colors in a flat, posterlike style, with penguins and other sea life rendered to look like monoprints or cut-paper collage. The flaps, which |

NOODLE MAGIC

Thong, Roseanne Greenfield Illus. by So, Meilo Orchard/Scholastic (32 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-545-52167-3 In this slurp-worthy picture book, Mei loves to watch Grandpa Tu create noodles spun out of dough, magic and

plenty of heart.

The emperor’s birthday approaches, and Mei’s village buzzes with preparations. Grandpa Tu, a master noodle maker, enchants Mei with show-stopping dexterity, as he slaps, kneads and stretches plain dough into wondrous noodles. Mei asks if he can make jump ropes or kite strings from noodles. He answers with poetic wit—“Simple as a sunflower seed” and “Easy as a sea breeze”—and works through the night with abandon. When it’s time for the emperor’s long-life noodles, a birthday tradition, to be made, the villagers are surprised to learn Grandpa Tu isn’t making them. Instead, he says it’s time for Mei to learn the art of magic noodle making herself. This intergenerational relationship endears from the start, and readers will want not only a plate of noodles, but a grandpa like Tu. Thong plants a playful, repeated rhythm to describe his technique (“SLAP, knead and stretch”), which grows organically with Mei’s discovery of her own talents. So’s rich watercolor illustrations radiate affection between the two, especially when they stretch noodles in a cats-cradle–like fashion or across the gutter in a vigorous culinary workout. And animal-shaped noodles, in the forms of cats, roosters and a dragon, add whimsy and elegance.

Playing with your food has never been quite so enticing.

(Picture book. 4-8)

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AUTUMN FALLS

Thorne, Bella Delacorte (224 pp.) $18.99 | $10.99 e-book | $21.99 PLB Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-385-74433-1 978-0-385-38523-7 e-book 978-0-375-99161-5 PLB Series: Autumn Falls, 1 A magic diary handed down to a teen girl following her father’s death eases and complicates her transition to a new school. |

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“Though stylized, [the illustrations] are anything but static….” from the monkey king

Sophomore Autumn Falls, so named because it was her dad’s favorite season, quickly connects with a group of quirky classmates when she starts at Florida’s Aventura High. Unfortunately, when clever, kind, gorgeous Sean takes notice of her, she unknowingly incites the wrath of Reenzie, his childhood best friend, who’s in love with him. Some truly wicked bullying follows, and once Autumn begins to understand that her dad’s old diary seems to make her wishes come true, it becomes hard for her to resist using it to fight back. This light read by teen actress Thorne mixes realistic drama with the vague paranormal power of the diary, explained by Autumn’s grandmother as having to do with the zemi on its cover, an icon believed by the ancient Taino people of Cuba to house spirits.

There are other references throughout to Bella’s Cuban heritage, so while it’s not completely out of context, more development of this concept would have strengthened the story.

Bella’s moral quandaries about the diary are believable though too easily resolved at times.

A somewhat open ending suggests there is more to come. Fans of teen romance will be glad of it. (Paranormal romance. 12-18)

ON THE EDGE

van Diepen, Allison HarperTeen (304 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-06-230344-8 Romance and danger combine in this companion to van Diepen’s Snitch (2013).

Maddie Diaz is on top of the world: She’s gotten a scholarship to Florida State and can’t wait to leave Miami, even if that means leaving behind her mom and her best friend, Iz. But on the way home from celebrating with her friends, Maddie witnesses two members of the Reyes gang beating a homeless man before setting him on fire. Going against the Reyes is dangerous in Maddie’s community—but this teenage journalist can’t let this crime go unpunished. She agrees to testify, sparking retribution from the Reyes while gaining protection from Lobo. Head of the Destinos, Lobo leads a crusade against the Reyes. Falling for Lobo is easy, especially when Maddie learns his real identity. But Lobo has to fulfill his mission—one that puts him between a dangerous cartel and the Reyes. How will Maddie cope with the danger that both she and Lobo face? While there’s not enough tension to make this into a true thriller, the well-drawn characters and setting make the novel stand out. The romance between Maddie and Lobo is equal parts sweet and hot and leads to a satisfying conclusion.

Ideal for readers who prefer a high romance-to-thrills ratio. (Romance. 14-18)

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THE MONKEY KING

Viswanath, Shobha Illus. by Krishnaswamy, Uma Karadi Tales (28 pp.) $15.95 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-81-8190-033-3 A monkey king risks his life to save his simian clan in this adapted version of

a Jataka tale.

Viswanath adds characters and details to the ancient original but subtracts some violence. Ignoring his king Kapi’s instruction to keep mangoes from falling into the river, Korung, “a mean and unhappy monkey,” lets one of the sweet fruits float off to be discovered by the king of Benares. That king leads a party upriver to locate the mango tree—and when he orders his archers to shoot the noisy monkeys in its branches, Kapi makes a bridge of his own body to allow his people to escape. Korung maliciously jumps on Kapi’s back, but the admiring king of Benares has the injured hero nursed back to health. In the end, remorseful Korung is forgiven, and the two wise kings go off to rule their respective kingdoms long and well. Reflecting several local traditions (identified in an appended note), Krishnaswamy mixes brightly colored figures and white-on-black silhouettes in her painted illustrations. Though stylized, they are anything but static; the monkeys, drawn with human limbs and proportions, not only display wide eyes and lively postures and expressions, but range in color from green to purple to black.

Monkey is often cast as a trickster in Asian folklore: Here he comes off as both wise and courageous. (afterword) (Picture book/folk tale. 6-8)

LIKE WATER ON STONE

Walrath, Dana Delacorte (368 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Nov. 11, 2014 978-0-385-74397-6 978-0-385-37329-6 e-book 978-0-375-99142-4 PLB This verse novel uses alternating narrators to document three siblings’ flight from the 1915 Armenian genocide.

The Donabedian family’s Christian faith makes them a target of the Ottoman Empire’s genocide. When violence erupts, the parents barely manage to create a diversion that allows three of their children to escape to the mountains. With meager food supplies and only vague directions on how to reach safety, the children’s courage is tested. But unexpected sources provide help, most notably Ardziv, an eagle who both occasionally provides scavenged food and narrates events from his aerial perspective.

This device does help illuminate the broad scale of the government’s brutality, but Ardziv also complicates the question of the author’s intended audience. While the novel’s graphic violence lends itself to more mature readers, they may view the eagle’s

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narration and assistance with skepticism. The verse is often powerful, especially in its use of repetition, but it does not provide the author with much textual opportunity to fully explain the nature of the ethnic and religious conflict. From a design perspective, it’s unfortunate that the information provided on the opening map reveals that the siblings survive and make it to New York, which may diminish the novel’s tension for many readers.

The emotional impact these events had on individuals will certainly resonate, but understanding the conflict at large may still require supplemental reading. (Historical fiction. 14-18)

WAR OF THE WORLD RECORDS

Ward, Matthew Razorbill/Penguin (400 pp.) $16.99 | Dec. 4, 2014 978-1-59514-691-5 Series: Fantastic Family Whipple, 2 The world record-setting Whipple family faces off against the rival Goldwins in the World Record World Championships.

A string of bad luck has fallen upon the Whipple family, and black sheep Arthur Whipple has taken it upon himself to investigate the series of unfortunate events that continuously derails his family’s quest for glory. The prime suspects are the Goldwins, an up-and-coming team that has the World Record World Championship in their sights. The bizarre mystery weaving throughout Ward’s sequel includes vandalism, bribery, murder and kidnapping. Unfortunately, this promising concept is smothered by stylization and padding. There’s simply no reason for this story to be stretched across 375 pages, other than to indulge the author’s apparent fondness for over-the-top buffoonery and narrative dead ends. The final straw is reached during the book’s last chapter, in which the mystery is resolved not by Arthur and his clever sleuthing but instead a letter left behind by the guilty party. This letter spans 10 pages. Readers deserve better than 10 solid pages of exposition at the end of the book explaining who did what to whom and why—and setting up the third Whipple adventure, one few readers will likely be interested in.

An exciting premise destroyed by tedious plotting. (Fiction. 8-12)

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DIAMOND BOY

Williams, Michael Little, Brown (400 pp.) $18.00 | $9.99 e-book | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-316-32069-6 978-0-316-32066-5 e-book In this sprawling, messy but compelling epic, a teenager and his family join other desperate Zimbabweans seeking a future in Marange’s diamond mines.

Patson and his little sister, Grace, don’t want to leave Bulawayo, but hyperinflation has decimated the family’s income. Their stepmother, Sylvia, nags their schoolteacher father, Joseph, into moving the family to Marange, where her brother James controls a diamond-mining syndicate. Unaware of the region’s chaotic violence, they survive the journey only with help from an enigmatic Congolese.

James welcomes his sister, while housing the rest of the family in a stifling, smelly tobacco shed. Joseph’s promised teaching position proves illusory—there’s no school. Mining’s the only job, and it’s mandatory. Hiding their finds from James means trouble, yet many miners try, including the youth syndicate Patson joins. His gentle, broken father doesn’t share his fantasies of striking it rich. Brutal mayhem, already the norm, increases when soldiers arrive, commanded by a vicious sadist. Lacking the compact power of its 2011 companion novel, Now Is the Time for Running, this tale is operatic in scope and intensity (no accident—Williams directs the Capetown Opera). Horrific events proliferate, generating a kind of sympathetic PTSD in readers.

What keeps them engaged is concern for Patson and those he loves in a world that’s all too real.

A haunting, harrowing tale guaranteed to give “bling” a whole new meaning. (author notes, glossary). (Fiction. 12-18)

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CRASHLAND

Williams, Sean Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-220324-3 978-0-06-220326-7 e-book Series: Twinmaker, 2 The fallout from Twinmaker (2013) and Clair’s role in the hugely disruptive shutdown of teleportation technology put her in even more danger than before.

The d-mat artificial intelligences that govern and safeguard teleportation are gone; the man who ran (abused) the network has been defeated. Clair’s suicidal attack left her less-than-dead, due to the mysterious AI Q’s decision to break “parity” in order to reproduce her pattern and bring her back (triggering debates over when—if ever—it’s OK to bring back the dead). But Clair isn’t the only one—the dupes (copies of people’s patterns with different minds in them) are increasing in number, and they are after her. Puzzling out who’s controlling them sends Clair into |

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a strange tangle of alliances. There’s her d-mat Abstainer boyfriend, Jesse, establishment peacekeepers and a representative of RADICAL, an organization with a libertarian outlook on technology and a desire to safeguard humanity from nonhuman threats, such as Q. Everyone’s looking for Q (including Clair), to no avail. The large cast spends the first act of the book continually running from threats and making little progress, plotwise, along their convoluted paths. (With all the characters’ mileage, the lack of grounding description leaves readers disoriented.)

Once Clair and co. stop running, the plot picks up, leading to some knife-in-the-gut twists and a gasp-inducing ending.

Despite confusing pacing, the implications and moral questions raised by the technology give the story weight.

(Science fiction. 12 & up)

MALALA, A BRAVE GIRL FROM PAKISTAN / IQBAL, A BRAVE BOY FROM PAKISTAN

Winter, Jeanette Illus. by Winter, Jeanette Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-4814-2294-9 A master picture-book artist introduces quite young readers to two astonishing heroes of the world born in Pakistan.

Iqbal Masih was only 12 in 1995 when he was shot and killed while riding his bike. He’d spent several of his young years as a bonded slave in a carpet factory before he escaped to become an international advocate for the freedom of children. Malala Yousafzai began her public advocacy for the rights of girls to education before she was in her teens. Malala, who survived being shot by the Taliban gunman who boarded her school van, continues to use her voice for justice. Winter, in impressive command of the page with her spare text and calm, rich, digitally rendered art, offers this difficult material unapologetically. As she often does, she distills the stories to their essences, conveying with very few words the fearlessness and the hope wielded by these children. Iqbal’s and Malala’s stories are presented as two separate tales, back to back. In a poignant double-page spread at the middle, edge-to-edge art shows each child atop a mountain. Iqbal’s kite string has just left his hand; his kite drifts away toward Malala. Malala’s kite string is still in her hand, and her kite reaches toward Iqbal. No source notes or bibliography are offered; author’s notes on each child summarize the facts.

Brave and heartrending. (Picture book. 5-9)

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THE INFINITE SEA

Yancey, Rick Putnam (320 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 16, 2014 978-0-399-16242-8 Series: 5th Wave, 2

When aliens attack: the end of the world as we know it.

Book 1 of Yancey’s series saw 95 percent of the human population wiped out in a brutal alien attack that coordinated tsunamis, a horrific plague and teen soldiers bent on murdering any survivors. Just when readers might think it couldn’t get worse, it does: The extraterrestrials bent on taking over Earth are now implanting carbon-dioxide–triggered bombs inside the throats of young children in order to wipe out any survivors.

The first are easily extinguished in the prologue in an ominous tableau that no doubt is meant to foreshadow what will befall Cassie, Ben and the teen survivors from The 5th Wave (2013).

What follows is a terse, streamlined volume packed with action and violence that will keep readers on the edges of their seats.

At first it’s hard to distinguish which character is narrating each sequence, particularly since Ringer, a secondary character in the first installment, takes over much of the page count in this installment. Her nickname says it all: She’s tough, fearless, an expert marksman and a survivor—and the bad guys particularly have it in for her. Everything culminates in a 180-degree reversal that turns the series’ cosmos on its end and will no doubt have readers impatiently screaming for the third.

A roller-coaster ride of a sequel. (Science fiction. 14-18)

THE CURSE OF THE BUTTONS

Ylvisaker, Anne Candlewick (240 pp.) $15.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-6138-0

Like almost all the menfolk in the town of Keokuk, Ike is initially thrilled when Iowa, a free state, is called up by President Abraham Lincoln to fight in the Civil War, but his happiness turns to horror when he realizes that he’s too young for combat and must stay behind with the women.

Ike Button, 11 and an endearing combination of credulous and cranky, is a high-energy wannabe hero who is constantly getting knocked down. And that’s what makes him such fun.

Hapless, continually bested by the conniving Hinman brothers, beaten by 12-year-old Albirdie Woolley in brainpower and checkers, and forced to help out in ignominious ways, Ike is continually scrambling. After an extensive setup that details the warp and weft of life in 1860s Iowa—kids should marvel at the differences in daily experiences—Ike is put to the test. He discovers a runaway slave woman and later her young sons in a time when it is legal to capture and return runaway slaves to

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“Small, friendly worms cavort around the smiling baby, who plays with a train made of brains.” from zombie in love 2 + 1

ZOMBIE IN LOVE 2 + 1

their owners, even in free states. This forces Ike, not exactly a deep thinker, to make a moral decision and take action, leading to his realization that the war being waged is fought not only on the battlefield.

Although the story is slow in places, the characters charm, and the material is enhanced by the author’s wellrealized rendition of time and place. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)

DiPucchio, Kelly Illus. by Campbell, Scott Atheneum (32 pp.) $14.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4424-5937-3 978-1-4424-5938-0 e-book Zombie couple Mildred and Mortimer find a live baby on their doorstep.

Although happy to be parents, taking care of a new baby often scares them to death.

DiPucchio uses a deadpan tone to recount the couple’s stressful transition into parenthood. “Having a baby wasn’t what they expected. / Sonny was a fussy eater. His teeth were coming in instead of falling out.” The young boy keeps them up all day while sleeping through the night. No matter what they do, the baby seems happy—which completely troubles them.

Campbell’s watercolor illustrations show gray-green scenes full of comic and faux-gory touches. Small, friendly worms cavort around the smiling baby, who plays with a train made of brains. Fretful that the baby is not well—he hardly ever cries!—Mildred and Mortimer take Sonny to a doctor, who pronounces the baby to be quite healthy. Finally, a growing Sonny tries to liberate himself from his crib and falls out. He erupts into tears and wails. His parents’ reaction? “ ‘Do you hear that, dear?’ Mortimer asked, beaming with pride. ‘It’s positively terrifying!’ ” Soon they are all smiling...and the final close-up shows all three with wide, gap-toothed grins.

Rare is the entertaining story that has equal appeal at Valentine’s Day and Halloween. Share with a slightly older audience who will fully appreciate the silly yet wonderfully gross details. (Picture book. 5-8)

va l e n t i n e ’s d a y roundup THERE’S THIS THING

Brecon, Connah Illus. by Brecon, Connah Philomel (32 pp.) $16.99 | Dec. 26, 2014 978-0-399-16185-8

A girl with abundant red hair and a green dress tries her best to share her heart with someone else.

The universal struggle to take a chance and share intense feelings for another person can be especially daunting for a child.

In fact, the language Brecon employs shows that the idea of love is difficult for many to describe. “There’s this thing I really like.

I would like to like it even more. // It’s all...”—an image of a pop bottle bursting with a fountain of color appears—“/ and...”— the facing page shows the girl cuddling with a kitten. She makes several misguided attempts to contact, capture or get the attention of who or whatever “this thing” is. She sends an invitation without a proper address; she leaves a trail of crumbs for it, but a bird eats them. At this point, readers will either be intrigued or confused. The girl’s attempts at “being someone else” are particularly out of step with young children’s understanding. The use of the words “it” and “thing” is frustratingly obscure, even coy. Only on the final few pages is it revealed that she would like to make a connection with a boy, who asks to join her on a bench. In his hand is a red heart-shaped balloon that he released on an earlier page and has evidently led him to the girl.

A muddle. (Picture book. 4- 6)

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RUBY VALENTINE AND THE SWEET SURPRISE

Friedman, Laurie Illus. by Avril, Lynne Carolrhoda (32 pp.) $16.95 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-0-7613-8873-9

Popular Ruby Valentine is back, and she has quite a dilemma on her hands. Will beloved pet Lovebird and new cat Sweetie Pie understand that Ruby has enough love for both of them?

Friedman sets the scene with snappy rhyming couplets: “At the Heartland railway station, / Ruby hugged Lovebird goodbye. / She said she’d just be gone a day— / but what she didn’t say was why.” When Ruby returns home, her pet bird meets the new “baby kitty.” The young feline grows quickly and occupies a lot of Ruby’s time. Lovebird isn’t happy. She “missed the good old days / when she and Ruby were a pair.” Jealousy fuels a competition between the two pets. They both want to impress Ruby with wonderful surprises for her favorite holiday, but quickly, things escalate to an all-out brawl, with fur and feathers flying.

When Ruby happens upon the tussle, she ends the conflict by declaring she has “room in my heart for two.” Soon the trio |

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“The digital illustrations have a cartoon comic feel that ably matches Skunk’s laugh-out-loud attempts to get back at Bear for just being nice.” from who wants a hug?

cleans up, tucks into some snacks and finally curls up together to watch a movie. Avril’s illustrations are dominated by Valentine hues but still capture comic details about the emotions and energetic antics of the characters.

A good choice for Valentine’s Day as well as for kids who are coping with a new member of their household, whether animal or human. (Picture book. 4-8)

SUPERLOVE

Harper, Charise Mericle Illus. by Chambers, Mark Knopf (32 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Dec. 23, 2014 978-0-375-86923-5 978-0-375-98726-7 e-book Dressed in pink and with hair in pigtails, a girl declares herself “Superlove” and determines to marry her pet cat off to her toy dog as her first official act.

Superlove believes she has the power to make love and a wedding happen at her will. Unfortunately, her pet cat, Pinky, is less than interested in becoming a bride. Still, nothing will stand in Superlove’s way—she wants to be “a real, live flower girl.” She gets to work hanging ribbons, decorating with flowers and creating an altar for the bride and groom. But when it comes time for the big wedding, Pinky has taken refuge in a tree and refuses to participate. Attempts to coax and bribe with food yield nothing. Superlove’s shouts of frustration bring Mommy outside to see what is happening. Mommy does not have a way to make Pinky get married, but she brings Daddy outside instead. “Daddy and I can get married, and this time you can be there, too.” In front of an audience of well-dressed stuffed animals, buzzing bees and fluttering butterflies, Superlove enjoys the wedding as a “super perfect” flower girl.

Satisfactory though slim and with a predictably pat ending, this confection from Harper and Chambers will appeal to all who dream of being in a wedding. (Picture book.

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WHO WANTS A HUG?

Mack, Jeff Illus. by Mack, Jeff Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-06-222026-4

with the grumpy if accurate assertion that “nobody hugs a skunk!” Undeterred, Bear replies, “I’ll save you one for later.”

Soon Skunk has a briefcase of “Super Stinky Tricks” with which to fend Bear off. First he tries to clobber Bear with a stinky fish, but when Bear bends down to hug a worm, the fish misses Bear and bounces back to smack Skunk. The second try is no better, and neither is the third—Skunk ends up smelling worse than usual. Adding insult to odor, with each mishap, the sympathetic Bear offers a hug. Finally Skunk relents and accepts a hug. In an instant, each animal is wowed by the experience. Skunk discovers he loves hugs...and Bear realizes he cannot stand the smell of Skunk. The digital illustrations have a cartoon comic feel that ably matches Skunk’s laugh-out-loud attempts to get back at Bear for just being nice.

Share widely. Few will be able to resist chuckling at this humorous yet heartwarming tale. (Picture book. 4-8)

DID YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU?

Pierce, Christa Illus. by Pierce, Christa Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 23, 2014 978-0-06-229744-0 Debut author/illustrator Pierce matches a litany of loving expressions to illustrations.

Matte hues against mostly bright white pages give a crisp look to this slip of a tale. A teal blue bird and a warm brown fox alternate dialogue in correspondingly colored word bubbles. “Did you know that I love you?” chirps the bird from its perch on a tree branch. Fox looks over its shoulder to respond, “Who, me?” As they are the only two characters in the book, it is obvious any text is aimed at one or the other. The bird continues, much to the delight of the appreciative fox: “Did I tell you quite enough?” “Could you feel it in my Hugs?” The bird’s declarations of love for the fox grow increasingly imaginative: “I’ve written it on the ceiling / and I’ve painted it on the skies.”

The final spread shows the two friends hugging as the fox finally gets a word in edgewise: “I love you too.” While the graphically clean creatures are pleasing in their color and the simplicity of their lines, there is too little going on visually to compensate for the monotony of the bird’s gushing sentiments.

An overlong greeting card. (Picture book. 3-5)

A big brown bear is generous with his hugs, and all the forest creatures appear to enjoy his embraces—except a grumpy, scheming skunk.

Mack is back with a tale reminiscent of classic Looney Tunes but with a warm if odiferous ending. Readers learn early on that even though Bear offers his hugs to everyone, Skunk isn’t having it. Bear enthuses, “[Hugs] make you feel great!” Skunk responds 124

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I LOVE MOM

Walsh, Joanna Illus. by Abbot, Judi Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-4814-2808-8 978-1-4814-2838-5 e-book A mother tiger and her two cubs show their love for each other in this slim tale.

This slightly oversized title features an adorable feline trio cuddling under pink foil hearts on the cover. Within, one of the cubs sings a paean to Mom. She plays the best games, bakes the best goodies—even evidently does the best laundry (“No jammies are so warm or so snuggly”). How right it is to appreciate imaginative craft ideas, baking skill and expert mediation between tussling siblings, but this mother is omnipresent. The bright illustrations exude child appeal, but they fail to make up for the often oddly worded text: “Some games are fun games but not like Mom’s games,” or “No one brings the sky closer to the seesaw.” Another misstep is in the depiction throughout of two little tigers but the dominant use of a singular pronoun; the first textual reference to a sibling is an abrupt transition to Mom-aspeacemaker: “But if we fight....” The intention of the whole is clearly to celebrate the mother-child bond, but it’s too bad it is not greater than its parts. Walsh and Abbot have collaborated before—with The Biggest Kiss and The Perfect Hug (2011, 2012)— with more impressive results.

Books about moms and their appreciative children abound. Pass on this lackluster offering. (Picture book. 3-5)

IN MY HEART A Book of Feelings

Witek, Jo Illus. by Roussey, Christine abramsappleseed (32 pp.) $16.95 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-4197-1310-1

Vibrant die cuts, whimsical drawings, and a text that explores a wide range of feelings with just the right touches of imagination and wit combine for a most impressive picturebook experience.

Readers will be attracted right away to the rainbow hues of the multilayered die-cut hearts that recede inward from the cover. The device entices readers to turn the page and enter into an exploration of emotion. An expressive girl explains: “My heart is like a house, with all these feelings living inside.”

On the facing page, the shape of a house surrounds the interior die-cut hearts. With each page turn, emotions from happiness to sadness, bravery to fear, anger to calm are displayed.

Witek expertly utilizes similes to help young readers grasp the concepts; a bright yellow star represents happiness, but a red cross with a bandage on it is emblematic of a broken heart when feelings have been hurt. When the girl’s heart is “silly,” she is |

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“like a bouncy bunny.” At other times her heart is “as heavy as an elephant” or hopeful, “like a plant reaching toward the sky.” As the pages turn, the hearts get smaller and smaller, until the final spread shows a garden with dozens of hearts. Readers are left to answer a question: “How does your heart feel?”

Consider this beautifully designed French import a must-have for any storytime or one-on-one sharing regarding the somewhat sticky subject of feelings. (Picture book. 3-8)

interactive e-books WENDA THE WACKY WIGGLER

Aslan, Christopher Illus. by Mullock, Emily Aslan Studios $3.99 | Jul. 25, 2014 1.0.1; Jul. 25, 2014

A rhyme-driven tale about a gamboling girl who singlehandedly initiates a

citywide renaissance.

There’s never any explanation why Wenda wears an aviator’s helmet and scarf, but nonetheless, she’s a cute little spindly lass who can’t sit still. When she glides into town (with a movement that seems a bit like roller skating), she appears to be looking for a fight, as her fists are cocked and shifting. But she’s really just grooving, and that drives the mayor and the townspeople crazy.

In an effort to stop her motion, the mayor silences everything— even capturing a singing bird—but Wenda hears her own song within. Eventually, her dance prevails, and it inspires everyone to create great art. The screen transitions are quite sluggish, and animation is minimal yet fluid. The text is lethargic too, appearing after the narrator begins reading; a row of dots indicates how many text blocks must be swiped before moving to the next screen. The visuals are bright and appealing, but there’s very little interaction other than a wiggle here, a wagging finger there. The intended message is admirable, if packaged in a weak, spoon-fed narrative: Be who you are, and it will inspire others.

With narrative constrained by the meter and an interface that’s mostly passive, this app is one to skip. (Requires iOS 7 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 3- 6)

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“The app presents a pleasing variety of backgrounds and colors while keeping an uncluttered focus on the animals and text.” from the farm noises

JOURNEY TO A BLACK HOLE College of Charleston College of Charleston $0.00 | Jul. 28, 2014 1.0.1; Jul. 28, 2014

Some grant-funded undergraduate research on black holes makes its way to the iPad. A scattering of inserted illustrations and video clips drawn from outside sources, along with a halfdozen demonstration projects and a set of multiple-choice quizzes—the latter supposedly with three levels of difficulty but sharing many of the same questions—aren’t enough to get this rudimentary look at black holes (or, nearly as often, “blackholes”) off the ground. Three “Lesson Plans” that are actually just differently detailed prose descriptions of how black holes form and are spotted include “An Introduction Into Relativity” and a video headed “Watch a supernovae here!” Other infelicities include a tappable map of our galaxy’s black holes with an irrelevant scale that apparently is meant to demonstrate the distance between our sun and the planet Mercury and a black hole’s “personal story” (“I was the Sid Vicious of my galaxy”) on faux book pages that scroll rather than turn. There are a couple of cool visuals in the form of a short video “journey” to a black hole and a simulation of what it might look like to fall into a black hole. Unfortunately, the layout is confusing, and it’s not clear what, exactly, readers might take away from the features.

Not a stellar effort. (iPad informational app. 8-11)

DRAGONS

DreamWorks Press DreamWorks Press $4.99 | Jul. 31, 2014 1.0; Jul. 31, 2014 Designed in support of the Dreamworks’ film How To Train Your Dragon 2, this original app/story begins with a mystery.

The story opens telling readers they are shipwrecked at sea, suffering from amnesia and surviving with a single possession: a dragon egg. In Book 1 (the only one currently available) of this multibook app, second-person address tells readers how they are rescued by Hiccup and his dragon, Toothless, and taken back to Berk to nurture the egg. As readers, who see what the amnesiac protagonist sees, progress through the story, new chapters unlock, presenting new characters and locations throughout Berk. The baby dragon hatches, wreaks havoc and plays. The second-person narration opens each new chapter of the story, giving advanced readers even more insider information. The story is beautifully supported with featurefilm–worthy graphics, crisp sound and compelling narration at every turn. Although every screen is animated, the only interaction beyond building a profile is “throwing” a boomerang to play with Toothless. With profile pages to personalize and 126

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three age-appropriate reading levels, the flexibility of this app promises to be worth the price. And although the mystery of exactly whom the narrator is addressing isn’t quite solved by the end, readers can take satisfaction knowing they’ve begun to train their own dragon, a chameleonlike, hot acid-spitting baby Changewing.

For fans of the movie, it doesn’t get much better than this. (iPad storybook app. 5-12)

A DARK AND DISMAL FLOWER

Herz, J.C.; Scott, Eve Illus. by Stokes, Shamona Coliloquy, LLC $2.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 1.0.3; Mar. 21, 2014

In this pretty if occasionally precious app, a mercurial child’s moods and whims find allegorical counterparts in the flower garden she plants.

Being initially dismissive of the 16 seeds she is given, her first careless toss grows up Spoiled (Primula putris) with a “ring of slimy petals / that smelled of black bananas.” Soon, though, a lighter mood sows Cheerfulness (Helianthus hilaris), followed by positives from Hope (Asclepias spes) to Diligence (Viticula industria). Her progress is not without incidents of backsliding, like Tattle Tale (Proditio pusilla), with its “smell of rats,” and Fibs (Mendacium delicatum). Ultimately she plants Gratitude (Iris memoris), then gathers up all the seeds from “the cottage gardens of our hearts” to pass on to others. Herz and Scott’s measured free verse is cast into italics with decorated initials, and Stokes’ illustrations, which appear opposite, begin, mostly, with delicate seeds placed on elegantly plain backdrops. Tapping an icon under each page of narrative causes the seeds to open, grow twining stems and burst into recognizable but fancifully altered flowers as bees, butterflies and the tiny girl look on or drift playfully past. There is no audio track. The final lush garden scene, accessible from any screen, functions as an interactive index and also features instructions for sharing sample illustrations via email.

It’s a bit mannered, but high production values and a realistic mix of behavioral ups and downs keep it from turning twee or labored. (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad poetry app. 6-10)

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THE FARM NOISES

Larrañaga, Ana Martin Ana Martin-Larrañaga $0.00 | Jul. 18, 2014 1.0; Jul. 18, 2014

Cheery illustrations and authentic animal noises make this simple outing to the farm a happy one, introducing 10 common farm animals and their babies. |

One cow is joined by one calf, mooing in delight; one horse is met by two foals, with hooves clopping along; a goat then finds her three kids bleating merrily. The pattern progresses until 10 kits scamper up to surround one sleeping rabbit. Martin-Larrañaga captures joy and movement in the animals, especially the babies, with each animal outlined in bold, hand-drawn lines. The app presents a pleasing variety of backgrounds and colors while keeping an uncluttered focus on the animals and text. Readers may choose the “noises” option, which automatically plays the animal noises, or the “quiet” version, which only plays the noises when little fingers tap a page. There is no narration, so an adult must read the names aloud and help count the baby animals. This makes for a textbook lap-sit experience, with an adult reading the app along with a baby or toddler.

Unfortunately, the text does not encourage interaction, as Noisy Farm (2013) does. Given the simple text, the opportunities for additional languages to be included in updates are great.

A simple concept book well-suited for a shared reading experience with the youngest digerati. (Requires iOS 7 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 18 mos.-3)

SENDA AND THE GLUTTON DRAGON

Soyo Interactive SOYO Interactive $2.99 | Jul. 20, 2014 1.0; Jul. 20, 2014

A candy-devouring dragon is at the heart of this fairy-tale–themed bedtime story.

Little Senda hears a story of a “Glutton Dragon” at reading time and then imagines herself helping a prince and princess in a typical faraway kingdom. The dragon makes off with the princess when he mistakes her for sweets. Senda and the prince teach the fire-breathing but otherwise very easygoing dragon that there are others kinds of food to eat, including carrots, potatoes and peas. Princess saved, Senda returns from her imagination to finish off the school day, then goes home and is tucked in. The app’s presentation is lovely, with dynamic animations and detailed color illustrations with a wider palette than is usually seen. The backgrounds are wider than the screen, allowing readers to move the image left and right and giving each page a panorama effect. The app keeps a running tally of the 100 or so stars readers can collect throughout the story. Unfortunately, the text ranges from only serviceable to clumsy, as if a few bad translations made it through editing: “The Prince suggested the Dragon: We’ll cook a delicious meal for you and, in turn, you’ll free the princess.”

Still, it’s very hard to resist a dragon who finally eats his vegetables; parents who are trying to wean a child off an all-sugar diet should take a look. (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 3- 7)

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TINY AIRPORT

wonderkind interaktionsmedien GmbH wonderkind interaktionsmedien GmbH $2.99 | Jul. 31, 2014 1.0.1; Aug. 7, 2014

A trio of cartoon scenes positively laden with animated surprises will rivet tap-happy 2-year-olds.

By way of helping to focus readers, the app allows them to follow one particular young traveler from check-in to boarding to in-flight antics. In addition, viewers can move other passengers (including a cowboy whose gun is confiscated by smiling agents) through a security gate, then get a variety of craft airborne in the background while a jet taxies up to unload, reload and depart. The third scene is a cutaway of the jet in the air, and tapping each seated figure—or, for that matter, the stowaway mice scampering about down in the luggage compartment—sets off a bit of action. These range from making a bored witch transform the sleeper in front of her into a frog to paging a flight attendant for a cocktail. A simple control board even lets children “fly” the jet. Touching signs, birds, a small red dragon, the sun or nearly any other item in each scene activates further animations, some of which last several seconds or change each time. There is a pop-up visual index that even very young children are likely to find superfluous, as well as toggles for both the tinkling background music and the bright, funny sound effects.

Absorbing diversion for both old hands and first-time fliers. (Requires iOS 6.1 and above.) (iPad seek-and-find app.

2-4)

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Sh e l f Spa c e Q&A with McLean & Eakin Booksellers’ co-owner Matt Norcross

By Karen Schechner For this month’s Shelf Space, we talk with Matt Norcross, co-owner of McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Michigan. His bookselling career began in 1992 when his mother, Julie Norcross, opened the award-winning store. It often appears on lists of authors’ favorite independent bookstores. In the New York Times, author and bookstore owner Ann Patchett described it this way: “The books at McLean & Eakin are arranged to beckon, and there are plenty of big chairs to fall into once you heed their call. It is the kind of store where I could happily spend a summer.”

What is McLean & Eakin famous for?

I think we’ve always been known for going above and beyond with customer care. It has gotten to the point where often customers come in and don’t even browse; they find myself or a staff person and just ask for recommendations. It’s a lot of fun and a great way to get to know customers.

If McLean & Eakin were a religion, what would be its icons and tenets?

Oy! Where to begin? To choose just one, I think it would be “Be nice.” Be nice to each other; be nice to customers. Just be nice.

Which was your favorite all-time event and why?

1. The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows release party. We closed down the street in front of the store and created a wizards’ fair with games and prizes. I dressed as Draco Malfoy and sat in a (very cold) dunk tank. Even though I was nearly hypothermic by the end of the party, it remains a favorite.

2. A double-header of Patrick Matt Norcross Rothfuss and Ernest Cline. This was a total geekfest! Ernest Cline drove his DeLorean all the way from Austin, and we set up projectors running old-school arcade games like “Pitfall!” and “Donkey Kong.”

Can you give us two or three highlights of the bookstore’s history?

My mom, Julie Norcross, opened the store in 1992. Eight years later, she broke through to the basement level, tripling its size.

Six years ago, my wife, Jessilynn, and I bought the store, and we’ve ramped up our area for book fair offerings, along with various educational programs for local schools.

What is your favorite section of the store?

We have a section we call “Quirk.” Some time ago, we realized that “Humor” was too limiting. Does a book like How to Survive a Sharknado really belong in “Humor”? I mean, for some customers, a sharknado is a serious matter. It’s just a great section, filled with some of the most bizarre books in the store.

According to the American Booksellers Association, indie bookstores have increased their numbers in the past five years. What gives your bookstore, and indies in general, its staying power?

I think one of our store’s greatest assets, and indies’ in general, is our ability to adapt and change. Our store recently added a vinyl record section to the store. I never thought that would happen, but it has been a huge hit.

We are able to try out new ideas, keep what works and move on.

What are some of the bookstore’s top current hand-sells?

The Painter by Peter Heller; The Last Policeman series by Ben H. Winters; and Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island by Will Harlan.

What is your ideal busman’s holiday?

A bookstore on an island beach with a beer in my hand and a stack of books at my side.

Karen Schechner is the senior Indie editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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indie Training Effects Reflections on the Art of Personhood Training

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: JUSTICE FOR THE BLACK KNIGHT by Jerri Blair......................... 130

Blackerby, Joanne CreateSpace (130 pp.) $16.95 paper | $9.99 e-book May 27, 2014 978-1-4973-1822-9

Grace and Baby by Peggy Leon....................................................134 THE THEMIS FILES by Sylvain Neuvel............................................139 Jackson Place by John H. Taylor................................................143

In this debut memoir, a personal trainer shares how fitness helps in handling life’s challenges, including her own.

Blackerby’s narrative begins with her father’s ghost: She reprints portions of a letter he wrote in 1993, which asked her to write again “[i]f you feel so inclined,” then briefly recounts his death by cancer, although his demise really began long before. “I know this now,” she notes. “Life is merely a procession towards death, its meaning defined only by the results of our movement, our journey through it.” She then describes her own journey, largely through the lens of her work as owner of Spirit Fitness Training in Austin, Texas. In chapters organized by exercise concepts (“Balance,” “Breathe,” “Triggers,” “Pain,” etc.) that often contain client stories, Blackerby explains how to find one’s core, to persevere and to achieve “overload”: “If we want growth in our lives, we must be willing to bear the stress and discomfort of the change we seek: Overload. If we do not achieve overload, we will not achieve growth.” Blackerby established her company after a breakdown that followed a stormy past filled with abuse, racism and rape. Her doctor father was autocratic and abusive; her mother was timid and defeated; as a 6-year-old, she was repeatedly raped by a 15-year-old family friend; she was also raped twice in college; and her multiracial family experienced major upheaval when they had to leave their privileged existence in Jamaica for Canada and, eventually, America. Blackerby concludes her saga by recalling her grandmother, a positive force in her childhood, and with a poem of self-empowerment that ends: “See you at the gym.” One can easily see how Blackerby must be a wonderful trainer. She demonstrates great empathy: Her encouragement of a retired widow seeking to climb to the heights of Machu Picchu is a particularly inspirational and heartwarming example. Blackerby is at times a bit elliptical relating her own rather overwhelming story, which may leave some readers wanting more. Overall, however, Blackerby has effectively harnessed the power of “muscle memory,” providing a series of gracefully written vignettes from her own and others’ lives to support a larger narrative trained on hope and recovery.

An evocative, compelling account of childhood trauma and the strength of a mind-body connection.

Jackson Place

Taylor, John H. CreateSpace (312 pp.) $11.48 paper $2.99 e-book Jul. 17, 2014 978-1-4995-3083-4

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the indie books that stand out— and don’t fit in JUSTICE FOR THE BLACK KNIGHT

At a magazine that reviews thousands of books a year, it’s easy to see the forest. Many of the books submitted to us for review in the Indie section tend to plant themselves along broad trend lines, even if they don’t fall into the evergreen categories of capital-L Literature, memoir, selfhelp, etc. Last year, first-person pet perspectives were popular; “Thanks, Obama” screeds hit it big earlier this year. Lately, we’ve seen a trend of books about horse abuse, unfortunately. There are, of course, bright spots among the bunch, and as Kirkus’ Indie editors, Karen Schechner, David Rapp and I take a lot of pride in sorting through and highlighting the books that rise above their neighbors.

Often, however, what sticks out most to us is a book that doesn’t quite fit—an outlier that catches our attention because it’s not part of the forest. What jumps to mind for me is The Metropolis Organism by Frank Vitale, a multimedia book about how the “form and function of a metropolis look uncannily similar, from a distance, to those of biological entities.” Karen thinks of Sutro’s Glass Palace, which we called a “lavishly illustrated volume” that details the history of the Sutro Baths, a now-defunct San Francisco bathhouse. And for David, “one that springs to mind immediately is Bulletin of ZOMBIE Research: Volume 1,” a starred book we called “a collection of scientific reports on how best to control and manage the worldwide-spread of Zooanthroponotic Occult MetaBiomimetic Infectious Encephalitis—zombies!” “It’s a truly unique idea, executed well,” David told me. For books that stand out like this, don’t think we’ll forget. —R.L.

Blair, Jerri CreateSpace (470 pp.) $17.50 paper | $2.99 e-book Jul. 28, 2014 978-1-4995-4033-8 In Blair’s debut novel, African-American Freddie Edwards’ life story unfolds across history as a complex tapestry, leading up to his arrest for the killing of

a 75-year-old man.

This superbly crafted, intricately detailed story is by turns joyful, sorrowful, frightening and uplifting. Blair draws readers in by establishing a mystery, as Annabelle Mann, the staid, white widow of a respected judge, is called to testify as a character witness for Edwards, a black man with a criminal record who’s accused of murder. The story then exquisitely details the childhoods of Mann, Edwards and his sister, Ruby, in 1930s Tampa, Florida. The post-Depression economy has forced Mann’s family to live on the edge of a black neighborhood; her father is a philandering salesman, largely absent from her life, while her mother is an open, generous woman. In graceful prose, Blair takes time to develop the children’s friendship: Ruby and Annabelle hit it off immediately, but Freddie distrusts the new white girl. Annabelle recognizes his innate intelligence, however, and lures him into friendship by lending him books. Freddie loves stories about knights, hence his self-proclaimed nickname, “the Black Knight,” a moniker he lives up to by always rescuing the mischievous girls. As Blair further develops the characters, as well as the time and place they live in, she toys with the overarching mystery. Chapters vacillate between past and present, and the narrative gradually drops hints about a strange, rich, neighborhood white man. Overall, this fine book offers well-drawn, human characters and logically flowing action, all written in a striking style: “Two silver-haired women walked together on an otherwise empty beach, its pristine white sands stretching endlessly around them, its peaceful quiet broken only by the sounds of waves lapping at the shore and gulls calling overhead.”

A must-read story of relationships, prejudice and bravery, and a vivid paean for justice.

crowded in the middle of nowhere Brock, Bo Rare Bird (380 pp.) $17.50 paper | $9.99 e-book May 19, 2014 978-0-615-97107-0

The casebook of Brock, a Texas veterinarian, reveals his most memorable cases and larger-than-life characters.

It may be the fate of any veterinarian’s memoir to languish in the long shadow of James Herriot, but author Brock’s humorous reminiscences will fit the big boots reserved specifically for Texas veterinarians. Inspired to

Ryan Leahey is an Indie editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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become an animal doctor after seeing too many horses die of colic, Brock studied at Texas A&M and set up his practice in Lamesa (the “middle of nowhere” affectionately cited in the title). Gifted with a folksy storytelling style (not unlike Grit magazine but with occasional curse words), Brock recounts, in nonchronological order, his more memorable (and, more often, funnier) cases, as well as encounters with peculiar creatures of the two-legged variety. Horses do seem to predominate in the narrative. There’s the one owned by a menacing tribe of bikers, on whom Brock paid a midnight call to sew up the equine’s laceration. At the other end of the size scale, an eccentric client asked the author to operate on a pet mouse with a tumor larger than the animal itself. We learn that cows, far from being passive and tractable, can turn violently on intruders with medical bags. In a late chapter, Brock lists his wounds and scars, proving that veterinary medicine (at least in Texas) is not for weenies.

Otherwise, details about Brock’s family life and extracurricular activities only come in incidental fragments. Readers still in major depression from the end of Marley and Me (2005) should know that tales of animal suffering and mercy killing are far outnumbered by positive outcomes (including an unnamed pig who survived his own euthanasia procedure—three times—to become a 4H winner). Still, the author pays sentimental tribute to the bonds between critters (horses, especially) and their people. An unexpected bonus is a touching guest eulogy (a masterful piece of prose) for Randy—the resident horse of Brock’s clinic—contributed by intern Emily Berryhill.

You don’t have to live in the Lone Star State to enjoy these companionable tales of a country vet.

STEWIE BOOMSTEIN STARTS SCHOOL

Bronstein, Christine Illus. by Young, Karen Nothing But The Truth, LLC (48 pp.) $28.99 | $9.99 paper | Jun. 30, 2014 978-0-9904652-0-1 In Bronstein’s illustrated debut children’s book, a boy becomes upset when he first starts school because he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.

Making the transition to attending school isn’t always easy for kids. Although young Stewie’s parents try to reassure him by telling him he’ll enjoy it, he’s still nervous. Right away, he has to deal with some uncomfortable feelings: “[T]he teacher said, ‘All Daddies and Mommies have to leave now.’ That made me sad and feeling sad makes me mad.” Later, just as Stewie settles into an activity, such as playing with trains, it’s time to do something else. Sudden transitions, rules, being told what to do—his parents didn’t prepare him for this. “Can you get me outta here?”

Stewie asks the teacher at nap time. Eventually, he acts up so much that his mother has to come get him. At home, his older brother and younger sister sweetly try to cheer him up, but nothing really helps until Stewie has a late-night brainstorm to make a picture-schedule of his day, which will allow him to feel ready for each activity. His second day of school goes much better: “And

when it was music time, I sang the loudest. (I am a Boomstein, after all.)” Throughout, Bronstein never shames Stewie for his loud, exuberant nature or his need to know what happens next.

Instead, his parents and siblings respect his feelings and work together to solve his problem—a great lesson for all families. The book appends a discussion with two child-development experts, explaining the theoretical underpinnings of the book; this section contains thorough, helpful advice, such as urging parents to practice school routines with their child ahead of time. Young’s delightfully quirky, colorful illustrations charmingly help tell the story as they convey Stewie’s personality. Further resources, including a blank, printable “What Happens Next” pictureschedule, are available on the author’s website.

Practical advice for parents and an entertainingly helpful get-ready book for kids starting school.

THERE’S A PATTERN HERE & IT AIN’T GLEN PLAID How to Get Out of a Bad Relationship and Get in Good With Yourself Frankel, Laurie $3.99 e-book | Sep. 14, 2014

A self-help book for women who consistently find themselves in bad relationships.

Frankel (I Wore a Thong For This?!, 2004, etc.) offers another title in the relationship advice genre, declaring that the reader must love herself in order to find healthy, lasting relationships with others. She sets out to help readers identify their self-destructive relationship habits, kick them and replace them with constructive personal habits.

Before finding Mr. Right, readers are encouraged to learn how to stop finding Mr. Wrong. Skeptical readers may find it hard to get into the book until Chapter 2, when Frankel shares an anecdote about one of her own unfortunate relationships. These anecdotes, sprinkled throughout the book, prove to be the most engaging sections—in particular, the account of her spontaneous trip to Kilimanjaro is laugh-out-loud funny. Frankel uses her stories to help readers recognize similarities in their own lives.

The advice following these anecdotes is friendly, with a humorous and self-deprecating tone. The book moves from identifying a pattern of bad relationships to planning exit strategies and getting over bad relationships; the rest of the book focuses on boosting self-esteem and improving life. Without being a scold about it, she encourages readers to take responsibility for their own happiness. Some readers may find the metaphors and jokes to be cheesy—“There was a time, B.C. (Before Crappy)...”— but there are some great practical suggestions for scrubbing a bad ex from your life and starting fresh with healthier habits, even if readers familiar with self-help books may not find anything radically new. There are a few less practical suggestions, such as starting a “Lysistrata Group” with the women in your life for sharing in “the collective female spirit.” Later chapters could have used more anecdotes and fewer metaphors, and it would have been especially motivational to see more anecdotes |

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“The author humanizes Edward without ever dulling the narrative and ably renders action scenes of shattering lances, as well as moments of contemplation.” from as a black prince on bloody fields

showing how Frankel used her own suggestions in her own life.

Still, the main truth the book is built on, that self-esteem and self-worth are crucial to relationship success and a happy life, is an important one that readers will appreciate.

A quirky, earnest guide to regaining self-esteem for the modern woman.

NORCAL 2025

Garwin, Bill CreateSpace (246 pp.) $11.95 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jul. 31, 2014 978-1-5004-4438-9 In Garwin’s debut thriller, rudimentary superheroes find themselves in a serious battle against governmental corruption.

In 2025, Northern California, or Norcal, is the site of the “Great Experiment,” in which participating citizens live in a heavily monitored area with its own Internet known as “the grid.” There, the government tests various programs in trial runs. It’s also there that San Francisco business attorney Chance sometimes dons a mask and fedora and subverts cab thieves as Cabman; he joins forces with Privilege Woman (aka Sarah) and Cellman (aka Chris). They were inspired to pursue superheroics by a journalist’s articles, which also supplied their team’s name: Gosh, or Group of Ordinary Superheroes. Soon an unscrupulous Washington lawyer, Roger Littleford, spurs the group into more dangerous territory when he targets an auditor, Alex, whose investigation threatens his power. Chance and the others decide to protect Alex, who may be hiding something from her rescuers. Much of the story’s charm comes from its familiarity, as the powerless superheroes have relevant objectives; Sarah goes after a greedy college professor, for example, and Chris snatches cellphones from impolite talkers and texters.

Likewise, in spite of the sci-fi title and setting, Norcal is also instantly recognizable: The residents, affixed with wirelessly linked contact lenses and injected with computer chips, suffer a lack of privacy, just as people today are at the mercy of GPS and social networking. The heroes are intriguing not only for their strengths (Wynn Warburton, a former Navy SEAL, trains them in Japanese martial arts and weapons), but also for their flaws (Chris bases his decisions on whatever Chance decides).

That said, the predictable romance between Chance and Alex offers no surprises. Littleford, meanwhile, is a drolly transparent villain; he names his company Smug after someone uses that word to describe him, and the vile manner in which he obtains an alternate energy source will incite most readers’ ire. Garwin also transforms his tongue-in-cheek story into a grimmer tale with skilled ease; just because Gosh strives to avoid violence, it doesn’t mean that its members always do so, and it certainly doesn’t defend them from potentially fatal encounters.

An often diverting sci-fi tale for fans of traditional superheroes, with just the right amount of real-world drama.

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THE MOUSEHOUSE YEARS A Memoir Haney, Velvet Civil Sector Press (358 pp.)

Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-927375-16-7

In this debut graphic memoir, a woman looks back on growing up with five siblings, her often overwhelmed mother, and a mostly absent father who was both charming and pathological.

The “Mousehouse” of the title refers to the family’s tiny, 700-square-foot house that reminded Haney’s mother, Meg, of a children’s book. They lived there for seven years, but the memoir actually stretches from 1919 to 1966, interspersed with presentday sections in which Haney converses with her dying mother; for Haney, this book is her eulogy. Her line drawings are crude, similar to children’s work or to cartoonists like Lynda Barry—effective and appropriate given the child’s-eye view. Pleasingly scrapbooklike family photographs, newspaper articles, advertisements and letters help tell the story. The beginning sections that delve into family history are revealing, especially those about Haney’s father, Billy, and how he came to be such a selfish, charming, extravagant, risk-taking, sex-obsessed narcissist. As the family grows and Meg tries to find independence, the children are often left to fend for themselves, with their father swooping in now and then with presents and treats.

Haney’s writing skillfully balances tone, employing wry humor and dry commentary to talk about darker happenings, including what might be seen today as child neglect, as when Meg charges 7-year-old Gus with being man of the house, having him go to the bank, mail letters and go grocery shopping. But there’s more: Billy gets Haney a subscription to Playboy—for her 11th birthday. And it gets worse.

Haney doesn’t dwell on these incidents, feeling that people are tired of incest memoirs and not wanting “Dad’s slimy stuff to take over.”

Haney is honest about conflicts with her mother and generous in imagining Meg’s point of view, derived from letters and journals as well as memory. Her five siblings are also given their dues. Hopefully, we’ll see more from this talented writer/cartoonist.

Engrossing, sensitive and humorous—a bighearted winner.

AS A BLACK PRINCE ON BLOODY FIELDS Jensen, Thomas W. Chained Swan (458 pp.) $13.95 paper | $3.95 e-book Sep. 4, 2014 978-0-692-26879-7

A historical novel about the life and times of Edward the Black Prince from debut author Jensen.

The real-life, 14th-century exploits of Edward the Black Prince—eldest son of King Edward III and remembered by history for his success

in battle—serve here as literary fodder. The novel explores the life of a man who commanded troops against the French as a teenager, inspired others with his devotion to chivalry and died before he could become king. As a child, he was afraid of the dark and lived under the threat of an invasion by the Scots. Learning the ways of nobles, soldiers and jongleurs, Edward’s education takes place on tournament fields and horseback. Throughout it all, in this telling, Edward remains introspective, sensitive and human. His impulse is to flee the famous battle of Crecy; though, of course, he does not, and he bears witness to the horrific glory of clashing knights and deadly archers. The author humanizes Edward without ever dulling the narrative and ably renders action scenes of shattering lances, as well as moments of contemplation. Edward’s insights remain unobtrusive, such as when he is camped with his father during the siege of Calais: “We made such a noise that it probably could be heard in the French city. I wondered what they thought.” Always longing for Joan of Kent (herself a complex figure) and constantly aware of changing times, this story of the Black Prince proves fascinating as Edward faces the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death.

Though thornier events such as the siege of Limoges are absent, the book remains a thoughtful investigation into the life of one of England’s most notorious figures of the Middle Ages.

Fans of historical fiction need look no further for a complex and engaging story of Edward the Black Prince.

HELLO AMERICAN LADY CREATURE What I Learned as a Woman in Qatar Kirchner, Lisa L. Greenpoint Press (364 pp.) $22.00 paper | May 31, 2014 978-0-9886968-6-0

In her debut memoir, Kirchner chronicles the unexpected transformation her life took while living and working in mid-

2000s Qatar.

At the age of 35, Kirchner was happily married and working steadily for Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Three months after Kirchner suggested moving to the Middle East for a year so her husband, Geoff, could launch his career as a freelance journalist, they were living there. Having moved often as a child, Kirchner saw the transition as a fresh challenge. Furthermore, she believed the experience could be the couple’s last adventure before settling down to begin their family. Conveniently, Kirchner could accept a marketing director position at Carnegie Mellon’s soon-to-be-opened undergraduate branch in Qatar. Here, she provides a helpful overview of the intersecting political and religious cultures in Qatar, and she starts each chapter with translated Arabic words that foreshadow the content to follow. While Kirchner delved wholeheartedly into the university job meant to support her husband’s journalism dream, Geoff ’s presence in Qatar began to dissolve as he seemed to be around less and less.

In increasingly heavy foreshadowing of the unfortunate turn

her marriage took, Kirchner evokes empathy through the effective communication of her raw emotions. As a result, the issues Kirchner faced, while sometimes obvious in hindsight, become surprising for readers. Meanwhile, Kirchner tirelessly navigated the challenges she faced as a female expat and breadwinner working in a patriarchal society. She found Qatar’s workplace culture to be especially complex, since the country is primarily occupied by a diverse group of foreigners. At times, Kirchner’s detailing of her daily work relationships can be a bit overly detailed and inessential to the narrative. However, through humor and her self-described “friend-dependency,” her internal considerations of her identity in Qatar as a woman, partner and feminist prove worthy of the reader’s patience.

A hopeful read exploring the complexities of navigating cultural and societal expectations abroad.

In the Valley

Lambright, Jason CreateSpace (334 pp.) $13.99 paper | $6.99 e-book Jun. 11, 2014 978-1-4993-0706-1 In Lambright’s debut war novel, the future is revealed to be just as violent as the past as Paul Thompson battles insurgents—not to mention his own combat trauma—on a faraway colony planet in

the 24th century.

Paul is an armored infantry officer on Juneau 3, one of the countless worlds inhabited by humans after the mass exodus to the stars that began in the mid-21st century after the invention of the Glimmer drive. No native intelligent life exists on any of the colony worlds; however, the Pan-American forces are still needed to quell the dissident activity that seems to pop up on nearly every planet, no matter how remote. Paul’s current assignment, his third combat rotation, is so far turning out to be his most intense yet. The Baradna Valley, which some readers may see as comparable to desolate Afghanistan, is full of action that keeps Paul and his team on their toes—in fact, even with the military’s modern technology, which includes armored combat suits and digital halos that connect soldiers in the blink of an eye, Paul is experiencing stress levels that are approaching unhealthy. Nevertheless, not wanting to let his team down, he continues to go out on deadly missions while reminiscing about the path that led him to Juneau 3, changing his life forever.

Although Lambright, who is a veteran, provides detailed insight into the realities of being in combat, the novel’s 24th-century setting is somewhat awkward. Paul fights Pashtun, Bedouin and Tuareg insurgents in the deserts of alien planets that are almost exact replicas of certain areas of Earth; the sense that currentday issues have been simply copied and pasted onto another century and planet is overwhelming. The lack of a cohesive plot is also problematic. If the story were slower and more introspective, delving deeper into Paul’s mental and emotional states, then the lack of a traditional story structure might work a bit |

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“With a clear, perceptive eye, [Leon] explores the tension of family relations, the realities of aging and dying, the gnawing need of addiction and the complexities of mental illness.” from grace and baby

better. But Lambright doesn’t quite dig deep enough, resulting in a novel that always feels like it’s finally building up to the big event yet never does.

A gritty, unbalanced work that has its head in the stars but its feet firmly on 21st-century Earth.

Grace and Baby

Leon, Peggy CreateSpace (208 pp.) $9.95 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2014 978-1-4961-7120-7 Leon’s (A Theory of All Things, 2010, etc.) evocative novel centers on two aging sisters, one mentally challenged and the other her caretaker, whose home is unexpectedly joined by two more family members.

Septuagenarian Grace knows something is wrong with her even before the doctor confirms it. Cancer. She can’t stop worrying about what will happen to her older sister, Baby. For nearly her entire life, Grace has been caring for Baby, feeding her, dressing her, taking her to the bathroom, administering her insulin shots, keeping her supplied with her beloved crayons. She can’t imagine who would be willing or able to care for her large, opinionated, mentally disabled sister who laughs like Santa Claus and assigns colors to everything around her.

Grace even tries, unsuccessfully, to take matters into her own hands. Out of the blue, their niece Lily arrives on their doorstep along with her young son, Walter. They arrive from New York City bearing little besides scars: Track marks can be seen on Lily’s thin arms, while Walter carries the recent memory of being surrendered to the Department of Social Services. The four try to get used to one another as they gear up for the yearly family Fourth of July gathering, where carloads of aunts, uncles and cousins descend on Grace’s house, the family home where she and her siblings grew up. The story is told over the span of three summer months, and Leon switches perspective among the four main characters, each of whom experiences memories and flashbacks that help illuminate his or her character. The use of imagery is masterful, from Grace’s memories of Baby as a girl, kept cruelly in a cage by their parents, to Baby’s many interpretations of color. Leon’s descriptions of the small town, the house and the landscape create a sense of place that is vivid and tangible. With a clear, perceptive eye, she explores the tension of family relations, the realities of aging and dying, the gnawing need of addiction and the complexities of mental illness. Leon’s characters are filled with humanity and individuality, and readers will no doubt hope for even more from her.

Quiet, lyrical and probing—a jewel of a novel.

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MOLLY AND BABOU

Mahoney, James; Mahoney, Marie-Paule AuthorHouse (106 pp.) $31.99 paper | $7.99 e-book Jun. 19, 2014 978-1-4969-1851-2 Retired veterinarian Mahoney (From Elephants to Mice, 2010, etc.) and his wife, a debut author who has worked as a teacher, relate the fictionalized adventures of their real-life dogs in this engaging romp.

Molly’s life seems as though it couldn’t get any better. Ever since her owner, Dada, rescued her, she’s lived a comfortable life with Dada, Mama, and her stepsisters, Rags and Pupsie. Life is peaceful and predictable until the day she meets a bear in a New York forest. At first, Molly is mistrustful, but she and Babou soon strike up an unlikely friendship. Their adventures send them roaming through the woods, where they meet creatures like Mrs. O’Possum and Mrs. Raccoon, and before long, Molly’s forays with Babou have become a daily pleasure. She’s shocked and saddened when Babou announces he’ll be leaving to hibernate for several months, but she eagerly awaits his return. When Babou comes back with a sickly, orphaned bear cub and a plea for help, Molly realizes that she must find the aid they need—and quickly. Soon, Rags, Pupsie and Dada are trying to help, too, and Molly hopes she can save Coco the bear cub and preserve her friendship with Babou. The animals’ distinct, endearingly flawed personalities make them appear charmingly human for four-legged critters.

The authors smoothly weave in facts about animals and touch on environmental themes in a subtle, child-friendly way, making the book informative without losing the joy of its fictional elements.

The illustrations perfectly match the book’s balance of fact and fiction, with a combination of traditional drawings and color photographs of the dogs and several of their forest friends. The photographs add to the credibility of the story, and readers are likely to turn the last pages wishing, like the characters, that they had a little more time to spend with their furry friends.

A heartwarming and educational tale of friendships among different species.

The Marble Wave

Mandolini-Pesaresi, Massimo CreateSpace (76 pp.) $8.99 paper | Mar. 23, 2014 978-1-4802-6552-3 Sharp as a razor but solid as stone, Mandolini-Pesaresi’s (Grecian Vistas, 2012, etc.) poetry offers subtle charms for refined tastes.

The title of this potent collection of verse offers a tension: the immovable hardness of marble and the fluid action of a wave. A similar tension drives the poetry inside, which is often beset by productive contradictions. Foremost among them is the poet’s balance between his language’s narrow precision and

the remarkable breadth of his frame of reference. There is some of Emily Dickinson in his style, and like the belle of Amherst, he writes brief poems; few stretch past 60 or 70 words, and most fit into a handful of concise stanzas, but they pack a punch. The entirety of one untitled piece reads, “When only a tree be left and grief / Has shaved the head and eyes of man / In the godly twilight / A silent cloud will trap moonlight / Until on eyes of stone / From cracked skies / dawn breaks.” There’s much to admire in such economical diction, from the grief that uncannily shears not only a head, but also “eyes,” to the enticing mystery of “godly twilight.” Mandolini-Pesaresi has a Ph.D. in Italian literature, and his broad knowledge base lends his writing a rich, allusive texture. In “Safinah,” for example, he quotes the dying words of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who requests passage on the ship Aphinar: “ ‘Aphinar, ‘Aphinar ... / Lonely name in the dreamer’s eyes / Vague as a half-forgiven memory.” Elsewhere, in “The Cup-bearer Girl,” he closes with a mention of Shams-e Tabrizi, the lover and mentor of the Sufi poet Rumi: “Nowhere to hide the breeze / Effendi of hoisted hopes, / Hailed at last, Shams-e Tabrizi.” Such a broad purview gives the author many fallow fields from which to draw material; he digs deep, unearthing satisfyingly weighty poetry.

Fine literature from a literary critic.

A NASTY BUSINESS

Margalith, Sanford H. CreateSpace (404 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jun. 19, 2014 978-1-4636-6585-2 Chutzpah trumps talent—and conscience—in this bawdy novel about making it in the world of New York advertising.

Back from Vietnam and a stint in Leavenworth for taking potshots at an officer, aspiring journalist Alex Brody now makes ends meet as a copywriter for a Manhattan ad agency, where his campaign emphasizing a bra’s nipple-showcasing advantages is seen as a stroke of genius. But he’s eclipsed by his Army buddy Lorenzo Moss, a man with a knack for shameless self-promotion who proffers a steel business card so a recipient can’t tear it up. Lorenzo’s best ideas, such as a campaign focused on a beer brand’s flatulence-minimizing advantages, are stolen from others. Alex’s habitual self-sabotage (threatening to shoot an abusive colleague; punching out a mouthy client) gets him fired repeatedly and sends him on a voyage through the Madison Avenue underworld. He finally washes up as the creative director for a floundering agency where he struggles to sell candied matzos to gentiles and Reich beer to Jews. Lorenzo, meanwhile, moves effortlessly upward, going on to more prestigious positions before his disastrous incompetence is revealed; soon enough, he’s ensconced in a penthouse as a publishing mogul and unlikely free-speech martyr. Margalith’s energetic satire gives a lurid, comic edge to Madison Avenue’s cutthroat competition and preening conflation of chintzy commercialism with cultural innovation. At times, the story’s outrageousness is too obvious and verbose (“I believe, Brody, you were telling me to commit an

anatomically impossible carnal act on myself ”), and Alex’s and Lorenzo’s parallel picaresques have an aimless, episodic feel. But Margalith crafts well-paced, well-observed comic scenes with a cast of Dickensian characters—“He had the lined face of a small pumpkin with wide, bulging, rheumy blue eyes and the moist lips of a child molester”—who simmer in their own booze, sexual loucheness, casual racism, and thwarted, self-pitying aspirations to creative grandeur. The result feels like a three-way collision between Mad Men, The Producers and Animal House, and a hilariously noisy one at that.

A raucous, entertaining sendup of Madison Avenue’s unique blend of artistic pretension and desperate crassness.

FROM SUN TO SUN A Hospice Nurse Celebrates Life McKissock, Nina Angela Gentle Wellness May 16, 2014 978-1-4675-3841

A memoir that explores the tender mercies of hospice care.

In this intimate nonfiction account of her experiences as a hospice nurse, debut author McKissock tells bittersweet stories in which she and her patients are the central characters and her hard-earned wisdom about dying is the major theme. “In this country we think of dying primarily as a medical event. It’s much more than that,” she writes. The author supplies sufficient graphic detail to satisfy our fearful curiosity about the end-of-life symptoms referred to here as “actively dying.” She describes the specific pharmaceuticals that, we are told, can make dying as natural as “an uncomplicated birth.” Each chapter tells the story of a particular person—an internationally renowned ballet dancer, a wealthy art collector, a baby girl—whom she cared for during his or her final days. With an open-minded attitude toward the mysteries of life and death, the author has produced a memoir filled with surprises. The book celebrates hospice nurses, the best of whom act with kindness, efficiency and optimism, serving as calm “midwives” for the dying. As such, it restores luster to the somewhat tarnished reputation of the hospice industry, which began as a nonprofit movement but has since attracted big business and private equity investors seeking large profits. That financial story is not part of this personal narrative, which never lags as the experienced hospice nurse moves from one patient’s story to the next and reveals an inner life in which her own death is never far from her mind. It may be quibbling to point out that, in several instances, the author inadvertently repeats almost word for word a sentence she used elsewhere in the book, as when she describes a patient lifting a pinkie finger: “To a hospice nurse, that is like a big high-five.” The revelation that dying in hospice care can be an emotionally uplifting last chapter of life is one of many in the book.

This tenderly rendered addition to the literature on hospice care deserves the widest possible audience. |

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Interviews & Profiles

Carl Reiner

The comic legend favors the random

By Nick A. Zaino III Photo courtesy Oliver J. Defilippo

Carl Reiner wearing his favorite tie given to him by Johnny Carson.

Carl Reiner has an incomparable show business resume. It includes more than seven decades as a comic actor, director and writer, which has earned him nine Emmys and one Grammy. He was part of the cast and writing team of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, straight man to Mel Brooks’ 2000-Year-Old Man, creator and co-star of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and director of Steve Martin vehicles like The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains. And that’s just a fraction of his accomplishments, onstage and off.

These days, the 92-year-old Reiner is more of a fulltime author. He just released a new memoir, titled I Just Remembered, on Larry O’Flahavan’s Random Content imprint, which Reiner financed. It’s the follow-up to last year’s I Remember Me, which O’Flahavan also produced, though he used AuthorHouse since Random Content hadn’t been created yet. And there’s more on the way. Reiner is already 100 or so pages into 136

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his next memoir, tentatively titled What I Forgot to Remember. He’ll expand the label’s reach in December with his children’s adventure book, The Secret Treasure of Tahka Paka, and publish two children’s books—Penelope’s Pearls and I Am Lilly—by his daughter, Annie Reiner, sometime next year.

Reiner keeps a pad at his bedside to capture thoughts when he first wakes up, and he keeps to a daily writing schedule, working three or four hours or more. “I’ll do it after breakfast and then I’ll come back before dinner,” he says, “and then if Mel Brooks comes and visits and leaves, I go up and do another two pages.

But I have to play my solitaire before I go to bed.”

All of that work will keep the imprint well stocked over the next year or so, and Reiner is thrilled to have the freedom to publish whatever he wants, regardless of the financial risk. “I have nobody to judge me but me,” he says. “I don’t think in terms of making a profit, I think in terms of turning out product. Whatever happens, happens, but I love the fact that they’re out there. I don’t think about profit and loss and all that.

And if I went to a publisher, they would.”

Reiner isn’t a newcomer to publishing. He released his first book, Enter Laughing, in 1958 and over the years has published short stories, memoirs, novels and children’s books. He has nothing against the traditional publishing route, and had some success there, but felt he needed to move in another direction. “I was OK when I had publishers,” he says. “As a matter of fact, in all my books, I thanked the editors and the people who helped me, because they really did. I had no problems with that. Times are changing, and I change with them.”

O’Flahavan, a filmmaker by training and trade who once worked with the iconic graphic designer Saul Bass, says that Random Content has five employees, including himself. The operation covers graphics,

printing, marketing, publicity (O’Flahavan set up his interview himself) and social media. He thinks for a second when asked his title. He calls himself the executive director, although he jokes he could also be called “CEO, maybe the ‘chief editor officer,’ if there’s ever such a thing.” He has some plans for the imprint that might not include Reiner’s writing, but without Reiner’s financial backing and insight, Random Content wouldn’t exist. “When it comes to advice, you couldn’t have a better partner,” he says.

Random Content will look to distribute to the big chains like Barnes & Noble and Target, but O’Flahavan says he’ll work with indie bookstores like Book Soup in Los Angeles, near Reiner’s Beverly Hills home, and BookPeople in Austin, on promotional appearances. “I think what the bigger publishers miss is really going after the small independents,” he says, “and really getting to know those shops.”

Reiner’s memoirs are charming and offbeat, not following a chronological, or even logical, outline— part of why the imprint is called “Random Content.”

They are reflections on and ideas about the daily existence of a man who has lived an extraordinary professional and personal life. I Just Remembered contains chapters on Jack Paar describing castrated dissidents under Batista’s regime in Cuba he had witnessed firsthand and a poem called “Ode to the Buttocks Bountiful” that Reiner wrote while he was in the Army during World War II. There is also an entire chapter of Reiner’s entries on Twitter, a technology he adores. It keeps him thinking in short bursts, and he enjoys trying to work within the character limit. “I always find myself wanting to send out a Tweet and not knowing what to say,” he says, “so it’s usually when I’m working or when I’m eating. So it’s very personal and silly.” When it is pointed out that the line between personal and silly is strange territory to tread, Reiner says, “Yes, but that’s who I am, personal and silly.”

For the new book, he’s working on a collection of what he calls “Randumb Thoughts,” like a short bit on the origin of the word “titillate.” Another chapter is written completely in homonyms, and another explains the concept of a “selfishie,” a concept he came up with during an appearance on Conan. As Reiner explains, it is “where people take a picture of themselves and a more important person but the more important person is barely seen.”

Reiner is proud of the books but manages a bit of self-deprecation in praising himself. “I must say that I Just Remembered is my favorite thing I’ve done to date,” he says. “It’s a great toilet book. It’s short chapters, a lot of pictures. There’s almost 200 pictures in it. And when you’re on your toilet, you’re entertained.”

When asked if having so many different kinds of books on one imprint helps Random Content, Reiner stops to think as though he has never pondered that question. “I guess it does,” he says. “It can’t hurt.” He believes people will know the imprint isn’t a “fly-bynight” operation, even if its output is a little unconventional. “Books don’t happen without somebody working really hard.”

Nick A. Zaino III is a freelance writer based in Boston covering the arts for Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, BDCWire.com, TheSpitTake.com and other publications.

I Just Remembered Reiner, Carl Random Content (334 pp.) $24.00 | May 2, 2014 978-0-9915-3670-2 |

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STREET SMART SELLING How to Be a Sales Superstar

BETROTHED TO TREACHERY

Moore, Gill AuthorHouseUK (182 pp.) $18.24 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jan. 9, 2014 978-1-4918-8733-2

Milstein, Daniel Gold Star Publishing (200 pp.) $19.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Jul. 21, 2014 978-0-9835527-7-2

A top salesman shares his success strategies in this compact, nicely crafted volume.

Milstein (17 Cents & a Dream, 2013, etc.) is a leading loan officer and CEO of Gold Star Mortgage Financial Group, a national mortgage lending company. He attributes much of his success to his sales ability, and in this breezy book, he lays out his formula for achieving superstar-salesperson status. The book is clearly designed with the busy salesperson in mind; it has short chapters, plenty of bulleted points and clever cartoon illustrations to break up the text. The work is also liberally dosed with “Sales Pro Tips.” For some readers, these snippets of helpful advice may prove to be most valuable. “If no formal measurement for sales success exists for your industry, create your own,” writes Milstein in one tip called “Build Your Yardstick.” In another, he advises a bold idea: “[B]e a proactive mystery shopper by contacting the competition directly.

You can ask them how they are different.” The sidebar “25+2 Ways to Enhance Your Sales Performance” could well become an experienced salesperson’s cheat sheet for how to rise above the rest. The tips themselves are probably reason enough for any salesperson, experienced or not, to add Street Smart Selling to a must-read list. The text is no less inviting, although weaving sales-war stories together with how-to advice isn’t new. Once in a while, readers may get the feeling Milstein is shilling for his company. He writes, for instance, about Gold Star’s hiring and training program and, later, about its methods for making new customers feel welcome. Still, the potentially self-congratulatory examples aren’t without their relevance.

Given the overabundance of books on selling, it is exceedingly difficult to say something new; while Milstein’s effort does not entirely break through the morass, salespeople will likely appreciate the authentic battle-tested advice offered by such a skilled professional.

Conversational, easy to consume and well-packaged, with an infectious passion for selling that makes for an enjoyable, uplifting read.

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Moore’s debut drama, set in the years before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, tells of three German families who fall prey to the Stasi secret police.

In 1983, a Stasi agent pressures Rudi Kessler, a butcher barely making ends meet, to supply information on two childhood friends: civil servant Karl and post-office worker Helmut. Both of them are allegedly passing intelligence to the enemy via microdots, and they each subsequently vanish. Rudi’s son, Alex, meanwhile, joins the Stasi; Karl’s son, Paul, becomes paranoid that other people, including waiters, are listening to his conversations. Years after the 1990 German reunification, Paul learns the identity of the person responsible for reporting his father to the secret police. As it happens, it’s the same man who was blackmailed by a former Stasi officer into marrying Paul’s cousin, Helga, as part of an intricate plan to recover stolen diamonds. Moore’s novel is so rich in history and character detail that it’s exciting even without the Stasi subplot, as Alex helps his mother find safety in democratic Denmark; Paul weds Englishwoman Rachel and makes a new life in the UK; and Helga’s new family faces tragedy as she loses her husband. Alex is one of the book’s more unsavory characters but also the most captivating; he’s generally disliked by people he knows, which is sublimely manifested in his repulsive habit of constantly sniffing. In one highlight, a notoriously violent Stasi thug grabs Alex, who denies his identity—before immediately sniffing and giving the ruse away. Moore incorporates the historical backdrop effectively, particularly the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, which serves as a palpable turning point; characters’ lives change swiftly and drastically, particularly those of former Stasi members. The story’s final act takes place in 2009, near the event’s 20-year anniversary. The novel feels a bit rushed at the end, as Stasi officers scramble to get their mitts on the diamonds. However, the unforgettable climax involves a multitude of characters—and not everyone’s left standing by the time it’s over.

A short, fast-paced historical novel with well-developed characters and settings.

“...Noble-Sanderson presents a sensitive account of recovery following the crises of war, and it’s particularly effective in how it anchors its story in domestic details.” from my house in meuse

THE THEMIS FILES

Neuvel, Sylvain Bot Bot Publishing $3.99 e-book | Feb. 2, 2015 978-0-9938926-1-5 This stellar debut novel—revolving around a top-secret project to assemble the ancient body parts of a giant humanoid relic buried throughout the world by aliens—masterfully blends together elements of sci-fi, political thriller and

apocalyptic fiction.

The story begins in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where a young girl named Rose Franklin falls into a huge hole and literally lands in the palm of a giant metal hand. The government gets involved, but after failing to glean any military or technological secrets from the alien artifact, the hand eventually goes into storage. Years later, after the project is demilitarized, the University of Chicago takes over the research. The head of the project is no other than the South Dakota girl who fell into the hand—now grown and an acclaimed physicist. When other body parts are discovered throughout the country—and the world—Franklin’s formidable task is to somehow secretly unearth all parts, covertly remove them from their locations and transport them to an underground facility in Denver. But when the rest of the world discovers the plan, paranoia, fear and greed run rampant, pushing humankind to the brink of world war. Because the novel is narrated through a series of interviews, personal journals and mission logs, the grand-scale storyline immediately becomes intimate as readers experience the historic events through the eyes of characters like Franklin; Kara Resnik, a U.S. Army pilot tasked with finding a way to “drive” the robot, which may or may not be a colossal weapon of mass destruction; and Vincent Couture, a Quebecois linguist whose mission is to make sense of the alien symbols on panels found with some of the body parts.

Like the giant alien artifact in the story, this novel is so much more than the sum of its parts—a page-turner of the highest order!

MY HOUSE IN MEUSE Noble-Sanderson, Gail Manuscript

Following her nursing service during World War I, an emotionally battered young Frenchwoman goes off to live alone in the countryside in this historical novel.

Marie Durant Chagall, the daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant, grows up with her older half sister Solange in Marseille, where they receive an excellent at-home education.

Both motherless, the girls help run the household and entertain Papa’s business guests. But Marie wants more than their busy domestic life: “I had an intense need to feel ‘vital’—to move,

explore and find myself caught up in places I knew nothing of but wanted to experience nonetheless.” When the Great War breaks out, 17-year-old Marie volunteers to become a nurse. She serves in the notorious Battle of Verdun and witnesses unimaginable horrors, until she herself is badly injured; her physical wounds heal, but she remains traumatized. In 1919, she moves, alone, to a house near the Meuse River left to her by her mother, with only a peddler, Henri, and his donkey as occasional company. Over time, however, her empty house and empty hours are filled, starting with the monthslong stay of three shellshocked soldiers. She finds that caring for them helps her, and even after one commits suicide, she realizes that he “had taught me that I wanted to live.” Henri, meanwhile, continues to prompt Marie with new ideas for little businesses, and later, a visit from Solange awakens many good memories. By the end, Marie feels like she’s part of the world again. In this novel, Noble-Sanderson presents a sensitive account of recovery following the crises of war, and it’s particularly effective in how it anchors its story in domestic details. Cleaning house, making beds, caring for the sick, feeding chickens, sewing aprons—the specificity of each of these tasks allows readers to share Marie’s renewal by paying attention to each moment. When she finally, quietly begins to flower, it’s more dramatic in contrast to these mundane realities. The book also raises intriguing questions about war, injustice and sexism without becoming didactic. Some sections might have benefited from more direct dialogue and less summary, and several ominous bits of foreshadowing aren’t followed up. Despite these minor flaws, however, this is a fine debut.

A quiet but moving tale of recovery from the trauma of war.

THE INDIOS

Palileo, Gloria Javillonar CreateSpace (215 pp.) $14.98 paper | $4.99 e-book Jun. 2, 2014 978-1-4960-2161-8 A historical novel that dramatizes the Philippine Revolution at the close of the 19th century.

In her fiction debut, Palileo uses the life of idealistic young seminarian Placido Mendoza to tell the tempestuous story of the Philippine Revolution. The revolt began in 1896 when a clandestine Filipino independence movement, the Katipunan, was discovered by the Philippines’ Spanish colonial overlords. Palileo uses Mendoza’s interactions with a dozen prominent figures to weave a fast-moving, complex and sprawling tale along the lines of James Clavell’s Shogun (1975) or Gary Jennings’ The Journeyer (1984). Most readers will be unfamiliar with the long-simmering tensions between the Spanish friars, who exercised ruthless power to maintain control of the colony, and the titular indios, the common people who increasingly agitated for their freedom. Mendoza is an ilustrado, a college-educated member of the native population, and in Palileo’s well-staged opening scene |

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“Rodriguez wonderfully evokes the ’50s with references to The Old Man and The Sea, This is Cinerama and Argentinean Grand Prix champion Juan Manuel Fangio.” from santa rita stories

set in 1872, the complacency of Mendoza’s world is shattered: He watches, horrified, as one of his clerical mentors is publicly executed by order of the colonial administration. Nine-year-old Andres Bonifacio is also in the crowd; his future as a revolutionary leader is foreshadowed by his angry comment: “God is white...Jesus is white...All the saints are white...No Indio would get past San Pedro, priest or no priest.” Palileo ably intertwines Mendoza’s story with that of the growing revolutionary movement and does an excellent job of capturing the intellectual tensions that led from the first uprisings against the Spanish to the Battle of Manila Bay. She highlights not only Mendoza and his personal struggles, but also the larger-than-life Filipino Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, who tends to steal every scene he’s in.

Overall, the author skillfully develops the vectors of this tangled tale, illustrating how all sides attracted equally intelligent and passionate adherents. The story ends around 1898, leaving open the attractive prospect of a sequel.

Detailed, compelling and ambitious historical fiction about the long struggle for Philippine independence.

Rodriguez wonderfully evokes the ’50s with references to The Old Man and The Sea, This is Cinerama and Argentinean Grand Prix champion Juan Manuel Fangio. His only flaw is in too often adding unnecessary buttons in the forms of lessons or morals at the ends of his stories.

Sure to transport readers to another place and time.

SEARCHING FOR HUGO Rosenthal, Naomi Minna NaoMinRose (324 pp.) $12.95 paper | Apr. 26, 2014 978-0-9828908-3-7

Letters and other documents from the author’s family history tell the story of the search for her grandfather, gone missing in a World War I battle.

In Lina’s Love: Postcards and Poems from Hugo (2014), Rosenthal published hundreds of postcards and handwritten poems exchanged between her German grandparents Hugo and Lina before their marriage. In this new book, Rosenthal presents her recent find—a shopping bag full of letters, postcards, telegrams and other documents, most dated 1914 or 1915, nearly all related to learning the fate of Hugo after his injury in a 1914 battle. Rosenthal again provides English translations with German transcriptions and reproductions of the originals. The correspondence is addressed to or from military offices, the Red Cross, consulates, etc., across the Eurasian continent: from Madrid in the west to Ussuriysk in far eastern Russia; from Stockholm to Tashkent. The struggle to extract even a scrap of information from the fog of war is long and hard-fought, taking on the suspense of a mystery, with resolution withheld until the end. As Rosenthal notes in some thoughtful comments, one theme that reveals itself is Lina’s poor treatment by her family. She’s constantly being scolded for worrying (even as she diligently seeks out information) and blamed for illness: “Seek to uplift yourself, my child, all physical pain is the product of your mental suffering,” writes her mother.

Lina, like Rosenthal herself, “clashed with her patriarchal relatives.” Historians will find much to interest them in this cache of primary sources, such as how quickly initial homefront optimism about the war’s course turns into accounts of privation, shortages and sad sights of young men with missing limbs. In some places, Rosenthal could provide more extensive explanations. For example, Hugo writes, “The torch of war has set all of Europe aflame and brought on the transvaluation of all values”; it would be valuable to know that the latter phrase is a concept from Nietzsche (elaborated in The Antichrist) and a sign of Hugo’s education, values and outlook.

A moving and very well-documented account of a woman’s search for her missing husband.

SANTA RITA STORIES Coming of Age in a Cuban Fishing Town Rodriguez, Andrew J. Outskirts Press Inc. (320 pp.) $17.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Jun. 11, 2014 978-1-4787-3698-1

A collection of short stories centering on a young boy coming of age in a small fishing community during the mid1950s in pre-Castro Cuba.

In 10 linked stories, Rodriguez charmingly conjures life in Santa Rita, a coastal town in Cuba, before Castro’s revolution.

The townspeople are seen mainly through the eyes of Carlos, a young boy growing up surrounded by his colorful neighbors.

Chief among them is Pedro, a homeless man who makes the wharf his home and who relates to a wide-eyed Carlos the rich history of their town. As such, the collection encompasses Santa Rita’s past and present. Pedro’s own story is a fascinating one as he narrates his youthful love for a young woman far above his station. A man of many accomplishments, he also tells Carlos about his adventure transporting aid via train to a nearby village hit hard by a hurricane and of his meeting with Ernest Hemingway during World War II, when the famous American writer and his “hooligan navy” kept watch for German U-boats hoping to sink freighters off the coast of Cuba. Carlos is featured in several stories as well, including two about his relationship with Veronica, a beautiful Jewish girl. The collection ends with Carlos’ leaving for a high school education in Havana and his emotional farewell with Pedro, a man straight out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and who provides the book’s true beating heart. Pedro’s stories read like tall tales, whereas Carlos’ have their roots in timeless stories about youth, like Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Basil and Josephine Stories.

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Uncle Earl’s Doggies

Sardar From Afghanistan’s Golden Age to Carnage

Schenck Jr., Walter J. Illus. by Langford, Ethel Marcella CreateSpace (64 pp.) $14.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Jun. 13, 2014 978-1-4995-1792-7

A lyrical ode to man’s best friend, complete with hand-drawn depictions of a wide range of breeds.

Schenck’s (Priests and Warriors, 2013) children’s book, written in tribute to the author’s late uncle Earl Langford, describes the canine kingdom from the perspective of the animals themselves, using “I” and “we” to trace their evolutionary heritage from wild animals to the domesticated creatures we recognize today. With illustrations drawn by Uncle Earl’s wife, Ethel Langford, the realistic renderings have captions with breed names and physical characteristics such as height and weight. Most depictions show dogs grouped by breed and in action, such as huskies and malamutes working as sled dogs in snowdrifts. The journey, written in poetic prose, weaves in elements of Uncle Earl’s life with dogs, especially related to hunting: Bird dogs flush out prey, retrievers fetch downed animals, terriers herd livestock, others even swim and nap with Uncle Earl. In the story’s insistent stanzas, the dogs’ plea to humankind—dog owners, lovers and keepers—is to treat them well, play with them and love them. Implicit in this entreaty is that part of loving animals is respecting their abilities and acknowledging their powers, not treating them like toys by docking their tails or clipping their ears. Verses filled with scenes of dogs at play attempt to extrapolate a kind of canine moral code: Dogs bark and growl because they defend what they love; they chase and nip because they are forever hunting. Though the story meanders into asides with details about the history and habits of certain breeds, owners of such dogs will nod in agreement: Herding blue heelers “long to nip at the cattle hoofs,” and intelligent basenjis “think upon dreams / of how [they] should rearrange the house.” Schenck keeps the matter of being a good dog and good dog owner at the forefront, without delving into a specific relationship of any one dog with Uncle Earl. Such an expansive survey of the dog world ensures animal lovers will spot their favorite breed, with a twopage index listing breeds alphabetically.

A touching tribute to a dog lover and all sorts of canines.

Sharif, Abdullah CreateSpace (176 pp.) $12.95 paper | $7.99 e-book | Jul. 17, 2014 978-1-4993-8830-5 A memoir of a man who grew up in Afghanistan, left for 30 years and returned to help after the country was ravaged by war.

Debut author Sharif departed Afghanistan in 1976 for an education abroad and didn’t come back until three decades had passed. After the U.S. invasion of the country following the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, Sharif joined a special State Department program to become a diplomat, which in turn led him back to Kabul. However, he found Afghanistan all but unrecognizable, torn asunder by war, tribal conflict and a Taliban hellbent on thwarting the establishment of a stable democracy. The book is a series of letters he wrote to family and friends while on assignment in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011. The epistles are bittersweet, enlivened by the author’s joy at finally returning to the place of his birth but also darkened by his realizations that the object of his fond remembrances was now plagued by strife. In one particularly poignant passage, Sharif recounts meeting a barber who turned out to be the grandson of the barber who cut the author’s hair when he was a young child. Interspersed among such personal recollections are meditations on the principal sources of Afghanistan’s troubles and what strategies could conceivably bring relief. He also provides a running commentary on other subjects, such as the core principles of “Pomegranate Diplomacy,” Muslim dietary restrictions, and important but elusive cultural terms and practices. Along the way, Sharif often writes elegiacally about his country: “It is certainly a tall order and a pipe dream on my part to want to restore the current society to some semblance of Afghanistan’s forgotten Golden Era.” The book closes with an epilogue in which the author reflects on the death of his father and, by extension, the decline of his homeland.

An emotionally arresting, thoughtful account about the soul of Afghanistan.

THE MONSTERJUNKIES Sanctuary Shein, Erik D.; Gates, Theresa CreateSpace (190 pp.) $9.99 paper | $0.99 e-book Jun. 27, 2014 978-1-5003-4832-8

A peculiar family of cryptozoologists confronts the tides of change in this young-adult fantasy.

Shein and Gates (Being a Normal Family Is a State of Mind, 2014) deliver the second entry in their well-received Monsterjunkies saga set in Foggy Point, Maine. |

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Cromwell “Crow” Monsterjunkie can’t stop looking over his shoulder, and for good reason: His nemesis, the bullying Ruth Grimes Jr., won’t live down the humiliation he suffered at Crow’s hands not long ago. But for Crow, whose family’s mission is “to find, protect, and study unusual, rare, and thought to be nonexistent species,” Ruth is the least of his worries. For instance, there’s Crow’s friend Beauregard—a highly intelligent sasquatch living under the Monsterjunkies’ care—who yearns to leave the family estate and seek his origins. Crow’s sister, Indigo, has grown petulant as college (and her future) looms. And Crow can’t find the words to tell his renowned professor father that inheriting the family legacy isn’t exactly on his to-do list. When they’re not caring for pterodactyls, sea serpents or shape-shifting gargoyles, the Monsterjunkies struggle with issues that are nearly universal among teenagers and young adults. Like all teens, Crow and Indigo learn—however unwillingly—that with time comes change. The animals they’ve nursed to health and loved like pets must eventually be reintegrated to the wild; their friend, Winter, crumbles before their eyes while attempting to cope with her mother’s death; and, perhaps most traumatically, they come to realize their parents aren’t infallible. As Crow’s fears mount, his father advises him: “It’s how you learn to know, to find out who you really are, what you feel, what you like and don’t like, what you need, what you believe. You may have to start by just listening.” Readers learn by listening, too—this tale of identity and self-approbation is accompanied by enough scientific facts and environmental philosophies to double as a high school textbook. Insightful but not overly self-righteous, it encourages compassion and a deference to the unknown.

A well-wrought sequel with more than a few excellent messages for young readers.

novel’s ambition is clear. The quick shift to Ukraine in 1902 confirms that this is to be a grand-scale epic, with major world events serving as the backdrop to generations of private lives across geographical and linguistic borders. The novel’s expansive scope means plenty of energetic interludes, as in the moving episode of Aleca’s return to Ukraine to search for her family.

However, the wide scope also means sprawl. The plot veers toward chains of exposition marked by abrupt transitions and unanticipated time shifts. It is also rife with melodrama, some of which is entertaining, some cumbersome. The same can be said of the erotic scenes, which have an impressive, and often comical, array of euphemisms. But when the drama is good, it’s also good fun, particularly in scenes at the theater, and the engaging protagonists are easy to root for.

Unwieldy but enjoyable despite the distracting structure.

Kingdom Come, CA

Strick, Judy CreateSpace (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | $2.99 e-book May 21, 2014 978-1-4960-3604-9 In this debut psychological thriller, a reclusive artist opens up to her new neighbors with life-changing consequences.

For her eighth birthday, in 1978, Ruby Wellman asked to visit the pier in Santa Monica, California. After winning prizes and riding the Ferris wheel, the family began driving home only to suffer a horrific car accident. Ruby was badly burned, and her 5-year-old brother, Abe, was killed. Today, the Wellmans barely speak to each other and pretend that Abe never existed.

Ruby, now a 40-something painter, blames herself; she lives in the small town of Kingdom Come, enjoying the company of her dog, Tonto, and a few close friends. Content as a loner, Ruby is devastated to learn that a family is about to move in just around the corner into a home once owned by someone she called the Old Man. Yet when Hannah and Mischa McCord arrive—along with their 6-year-old son, Finn—Ruby warms to them. Finn is an introverted child who bonds quickly with Ruby.

Soon, however, the boy finds an imaginary friend, the Wizard— who reminds everyone of Hannah’s grandfather, the Old Man. Is it coincidence at play, or does familial energy linger on the property? As Ruby and Finn grow closer, secrets kept by the McCords threaten to unravel their newly formed relationship.

In her debut, Strick successfully writes with the confidence of a seasoned author, building an ambient world around Ruby’s love for the outdoors and her wariness of people. Her prose is often striking: “I fall asleep every night to the hoot of the owl in the oak near my window, to the night breezes, the silence of the stars.” Elsewhere, she wonderfully conveys the intensity of the artist at work: “I’m addicted to the zone I enter, when I click off the workings of my nattering mind.” As Ruby and Finn’s bond strengthens (represented through nightmares and surreal paintings), the narrative’s emotional layers grow increasingly

FOREVER LASTS TILL DAWN Silverstone, Monty CreateSpace (388 pp.) $17.95 paper | Jul. 15, 2014 978-1-4936-5451-2

In Silverstone’s debut novel, two girls, known in their Ukrainian village for their singing and dancing act, escape to London at the turn of the 20th century.

Aleca Rabinovich and Sarah Brodsky are 16-year-old best friends who, in 1902, depend on the meager coins they collect from their street performance act. When the threat of pogroms begins looming over Ukraine, the two girls are sent by their families—who can only afford one ship ticket each—to London, where the girls must depend on hard work and talent to get by. Their physical beauty helps as well. Aleca and Sarah quickly find housing and work at a tea shop; in numerous erotic scenes, they also find romance, which in turn leads to rivalry and deceit, as the girls decide to venture into different professional spheres. Sarah enters the world of politics, and Aleca becomes “Alison Hayward,” a star of the London stage. From the novel’s first scene, in which a young boy races through London during a 1940 air raid, the 142

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“...[T]he author effectively exposes the vulnerabilities and insecurities that older people, particularly women, face in today’s society.” from feisty old ladies

Feisty Old Ladies

complex; characters like Ruby’s mother and best friend, Charlie, achieve beautiful realization. Whether Strick’s final reveal is garish or truly shocking will be up to the reader—but it is executed masterfully.

A clear new voice offering a startling, memorable debut.

Jackson Place

Taylor, John H. CreateSpace (312 pp.) $11.48 paper | $2.99 e-book | Jul. 17, 2014 978-1-4995-3083-4 A historical novel that cleverly postulates an alternate reality in which President Richard Nixon refuses to resign.

The author, former chief of staff to Nixon, is well-positioned to pen a novel based on Nixon’s drama-ridden presidency. Taylor’s second book (Patterns of Abuse, 1988) follows the events on the day Nixon announced his intention to vacate the White House in 1974. In this version, without informing his closest advisers, Nixon decides to remain in the Oval Office. In order to properly defend himself against his Watergate accusers, the president invokes the 25th Amendment, which allows him to temporarily hand over his executive powers to Vice President Gerald Ford. Only one person, an unheralded and green staffer, Emily Weissman, seems to be in the know; Nixon asked her to help him craft his bombshell remarks. What ensues is the chaos that often accompanies uncertainty. Will Nixon’s unprecedented transfer of power generate the appearance of national weakness, potentially emboldening North Vietnam to defy a standing peace accord with the South? Will a battered Republican Party, likely to lose even more ground in the upcoming congressional elections, be further demoralized or find renewal in Nixon’s intransigence? Even mundane practical matters seem difficult to settle decisively: Does the Constitution mandate that Ford be sworn in? Emily, a staunch Nixon loyalist, is the beating heart of the narrative, rising to the challenge of historymaking. And to complicate matters, she falls for a calculating Reagan operative who takes the other side in an internecine war brewing within the Republican Party. The prose is razor-sharp and historically astute, and the dialogue is crisp and witty. Consider this gem from the staff secretary at the National Security Council; he’s talking to the White House operator after Nixon handed the baton to Ford: “ ‘This is Mr. Szabados at the NSC. May I please speak with the president?’ ‘Which one?’ she said.

‘The one who bombed Cambodia.’ ” An artfully rendered, suspenseful look at an imaginary turn in Nixon’s presidency.

Weitz, Cynthia CreateSpace (330 pp.) $13.95 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jun. 6, 2014 978-1-4974-6207-6 Sexy senior socialite Margot Manning makes friends and investigates suspicious deaths during her short-term stay at the Shady Palms life-care center in this mystery debut.

Injured after falling off her stilettos, Weitz’s 65-year-old heroine must recover for a spell at the Shady Palms senior care complex, not far from her home in Laguna Hills, California. Her boyfriend, Hans, a Danish former race car driver, reassures her that she’s as beautiful as ever. Unfortunately, Margot’s disgruntled nephew, Rudy, seizes this opportunity to move into her house and apply to be conservator of her estate, claiming she can’t manage her own affairs. Margot is shocked when the case is treated seriously at an initial hearing and annoyed when Hans keeps suggesting that she use Diana, a younger, attractive neighbor, as her attorney. She retains another lawyer, who encourages her to do volunteer work at Shady Palms to demonstrate her responsibility. Margot forms friendships with other residents and initiates group activities, including makeovers and a trip to a museum. Then a series of incidents (two deaths, one coma) occurs in the area overseen by mean head nurse Helga. While Hans advises her not to meddle and suggests that her sleuthing could be risky, Margot checks herself in and out of Shady Palms to pursue various leads that include meeting up with Rick, a local, handsome golf pro. By the novel’s end, Margot and other female residents create an ambush to solve the mystery, after which the heroine gets back on track with her life. Weitz has admirably created a senior sleuth who is not a Miss Marple type but instead a fun-loving fashionista who likes to flirt and (gasp!) have sex. Through her nursing-home setting and conservator subplot, the author effectively exposes the vulnerabilities and insecurities that older people, particularly women, face in today’s society. Weitz never lets this occasionally meandering narrative stay downbeat for long, however, and leaves readers looking forward to the next adventures featuring this lively, life-affirming protagonist.

An affecting, amusing whodunit that defies ageist stereotypes.

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Africa’s Release The Journey Continues

same. The village has decided to appease Bobo in the spirit world by repairing their roads and undertaking other developments, even when these developments attract more visitors than villagers are used to. Back in Kansas, J.B. disappears; while in Africa, Celestine begins talking to the baobob tree, hoping for Bobo’s return. The villagers struggle with poverty despite their developments, and drama arises as the corrupt government becomes involved. The village’s eventual leader, it turns out, may be Bobo’s own child. Celestine gives birth to a son, and the village chief decides that this son will take his place, prompting a complicated lie about the child’s origins. Bobo’s son becomes a natural leader but is determined to “meet” his real father, leading to a final transcendent experience with the baobob tree. The novel succeeds as a portrait of a fascinating village and its politics, even if this particular portrait is outdated. The villagers’ communal struggles and triumphs, especially when facing off against governmental officials, make for a compelling story. It’s somewhat surprising to find a white foreigner like Bobo so enthusiastically embraced as a spiritual talisman among the villagers; regardless, throughout the novel, the culture’s traditions are visible, such as the detailed ritual that makes Bobo’s son their new chief. There’s plenty of momentum as readers come to discover how various storylines intertwine, and by novel’s end, everything is so well-resolved that it’s difficult to guess what adventures the final installment holds.

Although there’s less ethnography and more drama than in the previous book, this well-drawn story will suit readers already interested in recent West African history.

Wentling, Mark Peace Corps Writers (232 pp.) $9.76 paper | $4.99 e-book May 15, 2014 978-1-935925-44-6

Second installment of a trilogy narrating the fate of a fictional West African village and the foreigner who once lived among them.

Peace Corps volunteer Wentling (Africa’s Embrace, 2013) returns with a detailed novel that looks at what happened to a man named David and the West African village he lived in decades ago. This sequel opens with J.B., an eccentric man living in Kansas who takes daily long walks and performs rituals that peak around the full moon. The town, at first puzzled by J.B., grows to embrace him and his peculiar habits. It’s revealed that J.B. once lived in Africa and was, after he became deranged, extracted from the continent under mysterious circumstances.

The village of Ataku, where J.B. lived, remembers when Bobo (as they called him) phenomenally disappeared inside a baobob tree, confirming their belief that Bobo was a special conduit to their ancestors. Meanwhile, Celestine, a village woman Bobo slept with, finds herself pregnant. She receives help from a healer who communes with plants and will train her to do the

What She Said A Book of Poems

This Issue’s Contributors #

Wesseling, Margaret AuthorHouseUK (60 pp.) $11.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Mar. 23, 2012 978-1-4678-9045-8

Adult Elfrieda Abbe • Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Laura Barcella • Amy Boaz Jeffrey Burke • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Sara Catterall • Dave DeChristopher Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Anjali Enjeti • Jordan Foster Julie Foster • Peter Franck • Mia Franz • Bob Garber • Devon Glenn • Amy Goldschlager Shalene Gupta • April Holder • Matt Jakubowski • Laura Jenkins • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Megan Kurashige • Megan Labrise • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Georgia Lowe • Virginia C. McGuire • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Brett Milano • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore Alexia Nader • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Cynthia-Marie O’Brien • Mike Oppenheim Derek Parsons • Jim Piechota • William E. Pike • Gary Presley • Andrea Sachs • Lloyd Sachs Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Chaitali Sen • William P. Shumaker • Rosanne Simeone • Linda Simon • Elaine Sioufi • Wendy Smith • Sofia Sokolove • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Matthew Tiffany • Sheila Trask • Claire Trazenfeld • Steve Weinberg • Rodney Welch Gordon West • Carol White • Chris White • Joan Wilentz • Kerry Winfrey Nick A. Zaino III • Alex Zimmerman

Wesseling’s spare verse cuts through the insidious chatter of the modern day and reminds readers of words’ stark power.

Good poets know that poetry is no facile concatenation of rhymes and rhythms, but instead the hard-won result of wrestling with the rudiments of a language we think we know but don’t. Wesseling is a good poet, and the foundation of her verse is the basic challenge of human communication—bridging the gap between people. She describes her increasing obsession with that gap in an early piece: “More and more / I focus on the distancers / walls of flesh and skin / making and separating us. / And the air thin nothing / to carry our voices.” “[D]istancers”—those things that keep people apart, keep people from connecting—are crucial to the author’s worldview, as they can turn communications into “inefficient twitterings.” She yearns to make her own twitterings more efficient, but she notes that content, too, is quite difficult to convey. “Here’s a poem,” she writes in “Community,” “What’s it about? That’s / hard to answer. It has to do / with who

Children’s & Teen Alison Anholt-White • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • F. Lee Hall • Megan Honig • Jennifer Hubert • Kathleen T. Isaacs Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • Joy Kim • Megan Dowd Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Nina Lindsay • Wendy Lukehart • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • Shelly McNerney • Kathie Meizner • R. Moore • Deb Paulson • John Edward Peters • Melissa Rabey Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Melissa Riddle Chalos Leslie L. Rounds • Mindy Schanback • Mary Ann Scheuer • Dean Schneider • Hillary Foote Schwartz • Stephanie Seales • John W. Shannon • Robin Smith • Edward T. Sullivan • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Kimberly Whitmer • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko Indie Sarah Alender • Paul Allen • Kent Armstrong • Hillary Carter • Charles Cassady • Stephanie Cerra • Steve Donoghue • Joe Ferguson • Shannon Gallagher • Courtney Gillette • Derek Harmening • Justin Hickey • Ivan Kenneally • Grace Labatt • Collin Marchiando • Hannah McBride • Ingrid Mellor • Kathleen O’Dell • Florence Olsen • Joshua T. Pederson • Judy Quinn Ken Salikof • Barry Silverstein

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you are and who / you are to me.” One way she tries to make her poetry more efficient is to pare it down to the simplest diction, using only the most basic building blocks of language; take the opening lines of “Impatient,” for example: “I don’t know why we didn’t use that afternoon / to buy oranges, some fruit. It was / dark enough. Heavy, greasy.” This whittling-away also has the happy effect of reminding readers just how much meaning they may wring from little words. But Wesseling’s efforts aren’t all dour striving, and she never loses her sense of humor. In “Prayer,” a lament addressed to an ineffectual deity, she writes of “God / mismanager of the funds of the universe / probably embezzling up there / and that’s why I have all these parking tickets.” To fit some laughs into such an admirably serious undertaking is no small feat.

Strong poetry whittled to a fine, sharp point.

DEMYSTIFYING ISLAM Tackling the Tough Questions Zafar, Harris Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (218 pp.) $35.00 | $34.99 e-book | May 29, 2014 978-1-4422-2327-1

This scholarly analysis of Islam attempts to rescue it from modern misappropriations.

While this is Zafar’s first booklength effort, his writings about Islam have appeared in numerous places—USA Today, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, etc. A national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA, Zafar investigates the central tenets of Islam, the result of his 15 years of reflection. He begins by conceding that the rise of terrorism by fanatical Muslim groups has created a “difficult landscape for the study of this rapidly growing religion.” Aiming to clarify the essential doctrines of a religion clouded by war and ideological disputes, his book acts as a helpful primer on the basics; he lucidly parses terms such as “Islam” and “Muslim,” the nature of fasting and alms giving, and the distinction between various sects such as Sunni and Shia. He also provides an erudite compendium of the differences and similarities between the three Abrahamic religions, demonstrating that the contemporary tensions between them belie their historically shared ground. This section includes fascinating accounts of the standings within Islam of both the Virgin Mary and Jesus. The heart of the analysis, though, is the contention that Islam, while sadly depicted by many as the bearer of antiquated ideals, is largely consistent with liberal values. The author’s argument deftly covers misinterpretations regarding controversial topics such as suicide bombing, Jihad, women’s rights, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. In each case, Zafar argues that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace and tolerance, not war and oppression. Sometimes, his thesis seems to outstretch the evidence, at least as he presents it. At one point, for instance, he argues that the Quran “lays the foundation for a democratic society by placing the

responsibility in the hands of the people to select their leaders.” Overall, however, the book is a welcome correction to the politically tortured conceptions of Islam so prevalent today, as Zafar astutely acknowledges the way even Muslims themselves have contributed to these misunderstandings.

An important, original new examination of Islam for both the novice and the theologically sophisticated.

THE LAST TOP GUN A Story Of The Last Generation Of Navy Fighter Jocks Zimberoff, Dan CreateSpace (248 pp.) $10.95 paper | Jul. 25, 2014 978-1-4928-8181-0

Zimberoff’s debut drama is the story of a veteran combat fighter pilot’s life in the U.S. Navy, both on and off an aircraft carrier.

Cmdr. Eric “Spyder” Greene meets young aviators Lt. Steve “Rolls” Royce and Lt. Junior Grade Grace “Drone” Miller at a naval officers’ club. Spyder, a Top Gun graduate, tells the others about his career, beginning with his arrival at the Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. The occasionally insolent senior officer seems to prefer a time when women weren’t on carriers, much to Drone’s chagrin; his tales include downtime with strippers or prostitutes. But Spyder also tells of the camaraderie among fellow pilots before ultimately returning to the story that apparently started the conversation: the tragic loss of several of his squadron mates. The author, a Top Gun graduate like his protagonist, relays K i r k us M e di a LL C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny SVP, Online Paul H offman # Copyright 2014 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948-7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744.

Subscription prices are: Digital & Print Subscription (U.S.) – 12 Months ($199.00) Digital & Print Subscription (International) – 12 Months ($229.00) Digital Only Subscription – 12 Months ($169.00) Single copy: $25.00.

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An insightful, sometimes witty look at the life of a seasoned Navy pilot.

his expertise through intelligent, perceptive narration. Typically, readers can use context to understand the unfamiliar jargon—an “OK 3-wire,” for instance, is a good landing on the carrier. Zimberoff, however, doesn’t immediately spell out most acronyms, of which there are many; an accompanying glossary is definitely helpful, but readers will either have to peruse it prior to the main text or repeatedly flip to the end while reading. Obnoxious Spyder is a fascinating character; his unfiltered statements, especially regarding women, cause Drone to at one point leave and miss a sizable part of his story. But good humor keeps him from becoming wholly unlikable: He acknowledges the debauchery of Wog Day, an initiation for sailors (it entails a large amount of rancid liquids), and he amusingly refers to some women as “femists” before Drone corrects him. Spyder devotes a lot of time to the pilots’ recreations—including a stop in Australia, where he spent a few days and nights with a girl he met in a bar—but he also delves into intense flight experiences: e.g., a dogfight with Soviet jets near Vietnam and a downed jet in the carrier’s landing area that prevented airborne planes from landing despite their being disturbingly low on fuel. Overall, Spyder’s distinctive accounts resemble a short story collection more than a standard novel, but that makes it no less entertaining.

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OW N E R S H IP, M A N AG E M E N T,

1. Title: Kirkus Reviews 2. Publication Number: 078-070 3. Date of Filing: October 1, 2014 4. Issue Frequency: Twice a month (1st & 15th) 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: 24 6. 2011 Annual Subscription Price: $199.00 7. Complete Mailing Address of Office of Publication: Kirkus Media LLC 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 8. Headquarters Office of Publisher: Kirkus Media LLC 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses: Publisher: Marc Winkelman 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 Editor in Chief: Claiborne Smith 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 Managing Editor: Eric Liebetrau 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744

Publication Title: Kirkus Reviews Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: Oct. 1, 2014 Extent and Nature of Circulation: National distribution to libraries, publishers, publicists and other publishing professionals.

Marc Winkelman, Publisher

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C I R C U L AT I ON

10. Owner: Herbert Simon, Revocable Trust 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 Kirkus Management LLC 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 Calendar Holdings LLC 6411 Burleson Rd Austin, TX 78744 11. There are no bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities.

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5297

5235

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4088 58 164

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627 157 0 6 790 5198 99 5297 82%

661 177 0 12 850 5160 75 5235 80%

Appreciations: The Guinness Book of

World Records Enters Its Seventh Decade

B Y G RE G OR Y M C NAMEE

For many years I’ve harbored the thought that it might be a pleasant if not lucrative thing to open a bar, perhaps a coffee shop, devoted to the fine art of arguing.

The rules would be simple: Arguments have to be conducted in a civil manner, with a penalty for every descent into ad hominem snipes, and they have to be settled by means of the reference books provided by the management: no Google, but with various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a copy of Webster’s This fellow is challenging the Unabridged and the collected works of Leonard Maltin close to hand. Central to Guinness World Record for fastest ingestion of a chocolate orange. the argument-settling library, too, would be the Guinness Book of World Records in its various editions, whose history now stretches back a glorious 60 years.

Let’s say, for instance, that the talk has turned to the precise length and ownership of the world’s longest mustache, a matter that every civilized person has no doubt pondered at some point in his or her life. Britannica will be of no help, and Maltin’s précis of Big Trouble in Little China will get us only so far. But there’s Guinness to the rescue, telling us that as of the most recent measure, the world’s longest mustache, at 14 feet, belongs to a Mr. Ram Singh Chauhan of India, who ported it to a television studio in Rome to have its vital signs taken.

That’s news you can use, edifying all around. Just so, Guinness can tell us the oldest person ever to have lived attained the ripe (perhaps too-ripe) age of 122 years and 164 days, while the world’s oldest competing gymnast continues to take to the rings and mats at the age of 86. The world’s shortest man measures 2 1/2 inches short of 2 feet, while the world’s shortest motorcycle has a rear wheel diameter of not much more than four-fifths of an inch. And so on. (Extra points if you work Toxteth O’Grady into the answer.)

The story has it that Guinness owes its origins to an erstwhile manager of the London-based brewery of erstwhile Irish ale. While out shooting birds in Ireland, he fell into a discussion-cum-argument concerning which European bird is the fastest-moving and therefore, one supposes, hardest to shoot. Lacking a source with which to settle the argument, in the fall of 1954 he commissioned two researchers, the brothers Ross and Norris McWhirter, to assemble a compendium of—well, useful information may stretch the word “useful,” but certainly actionable information.

The Guinness World Records They did so, and when the book was released the following summer, it became an is “officially amazing.” instant best-seller, so much so that the McWhirters devoted much of their working lives for the next three decades to maintaining it. Their legacy endures, and 60 years on, the book continues to make the charts—and to set records of its own, including, it’s said, winning top honors for the most commonly borrowed but never returned library book.

There’s entirely too much argument in the world without resolution. In that regard, the Guinness Book of World Records, emerging from discord, is a contribution to world peace. As it enters its seventh decade, we honor it accordingly.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews. |

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RANDOM RECOMMENDS Staff Favorites from Erica

RECOMMENDS

Kelly

Andrew Lovett Everlasting Lane: A Novel

A heartfelt and wondrous debut about mothers and sons, fears and risks, and the lengths we’ll go for those we love that Karen Russell calls “a bruiser of a tale” and that Philipp Meyer calls “astonishing.” Will has never been outside, or gotten to know anyone other than his agoraphobic mother. When Will ventures outside, he meets and befriends Jonah, a quiet boy who introduces Will to skateboarding. For fans of Tell the Wolves I’m Home, The Family Fang, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

A captivating, absorbing, and suspenseful debut of the spells of childhood. A timeless coming-of-age tale as charming and haunting as the movie Stand

By Me. Tells the story of what happens when nine-year-old Peter’s father dies and his mother moves them from the city to a house in the countryside, for what seem to Peter to be mysterious reasons. He is disturbed by the growing awareness that his mother may be some sort of outcast, and that she’s hiding something from him in a locked room in the attic, a room she’s expressly forbidden him from entering.

978-0-771-02365-1 | $29.95C McClelland & Stewart | HC

E 978-0-804-14081-2

Jen

RECOMMENDS

Michael Christie If I Fall, If I Die: A Novel

978-0-804-14080-5 | $25.00 | 25,000 Hogarth | HC | January

Random House Library Marketing

978-1-61219-380-9 | $25.95/$25.95C 10,000 | Melville House | HC | January

E 978-1-61219-381-6

RECOMMENDS

Kate Alcott A Touch of Stardust: A Novel

Frankly, my dear, I loved this book! This juicy novel takes readers behind the scenes of the filming of Gone with the Wind, while turning the spotlight on the passionate affair between its dashing leading man, Clark Gable, and the blithe, free-spirited actress, Carole Lombard. The read delivers romance, gossip-filled Old Hollywood details, and a look inside the glamorous world that Lombard shared with Gable. And what a treat for fans of Gone with the Wind!

Like Alcott’s bestseller, The Dressmaker, this entrancing historical fiction title is perfect for book groups.

978-0-385-53904-3 | $25.00/$29.95C 75,000 | Doubleday | HC | February

E 978-0-385-53905-0

] AD: 978-1-101-88945-9 ] CD: 978-1-101-88944-2

Hugo

RECOMMENDS

Alan Bradley As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust: A Flavia de Luce Novel

In this Agatha Award-winning and New York Times bestselling series of enchanting mysteries, chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce once again brings her knowledge of poisons and her indefatigable spirit to solve dastardly crimes—but this time, she leaves behind her beloved English countryside, and takes her sleuthing prowess to the unexpectedly unsavory world of Canadian boarding schools.

Contrary, precocious, and witty, Flavia de Luce will win over adults and teens alike.

978-0-345-53993-9 | $25.00 | 50,000 Delacorte Press | HC | March 978-0-385-67838-4 | $29.95C Doubleday Canada | HC

E 978-0-345-53995-3

] AD: 978-0-449-80764-4 ] CD: 978-0-449-80763-7

To request egalleys and view our online catalogs, visit TinyURL.com/RHLibraryCatalogs

Find Us at www.RandomHouseLibrary.com | Join Our Network: /RHLibrary

Elizabeth RECOMMENDS

Jill Alexander Essbaum Hausfrau: A Novel Anna Benz seems to have it all —a successful banker husband, three young children, a home in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. But Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift, she tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her. This is a powerful and daring debut novel about marriage, morality, and the choices we make. I guarantee you won’t be able to stop talking about this book.

978-0-8129-9753-8 | $26.00/$31.00C 75,000 | Random House | HC | March

E 978-0-8129-9754-5

] AD: 978-0-553-55161-7 ] CD: 978-0-553-55160-0