Archives -- More book reviews and article from The Globe

  • A moveable manuscript

    The publisher Scribner stirred debate in literary circles this summer when it published a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.’’ Scribner called it “restored.’’ Among the matters under debate is whether a classic should be reworked. (Globe Correspondent, 9/12/09)

  • Ted Kennedy’s memoir recounts his achievements

    As a boy, he danced with the future queen of England, received his First Communion from Pope Pius XII, and shook hands with slugger Babe Ruth. As a young man he was nearly killed climbing a mountain, flew airplanes in bad weather, and took his first ski jump on a whim. He pursued life recklessly. His political career - the ... (Globe Correspondent, 9/12/09)

  • Short takes

    THE MUSIC ROOM: A Memoir By William Fiennes Norton, 224 pp., $24.95 “I didn’t question the world as I found it: our wide moat and gatehouse tower, the medieval chapel above the kitchen, the huge uninhabited rooms to the west and the parade of strangers that passed through them each year. . . . I didn’t question my brother’s seizures ... (Globe Correspondent, 9/12/09)

  • American history in so many words

    The cultural meaning of works by writers as disparate as Louisa May Alcott and Linda Lovelace is examined in “A New Literary History of America’’ (Harvard University Press, $49.95), edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Topping 1,000 pages, “History’’ contains 216 essays, each of which stands on its own as a work of scholarship and imagination. Contributors discuss what ... (Boston Globe, 9/12/09)

  • A life salvaged, offering few lessons

    Readers have become well familiar with what essayist Sven Birkerts calls the “traumatic memoir,’’ works that are “private salvage operations’’ seeking to address the discontinuity, the fracture, at the center of a damaged life, aiming to recreate through the narrative’s structure not only the pain of the author’s experience but also “the overcoming of the wound, whether through repair, reconciliation, ... (Globe Correspondent, 9/12/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Michael Ru bens reads from “The Sheriff of Yrnameer,’’ 2 p.m., Harvard Square Coop. (Boston Globe, 9/12/09)

  • Fall feast for fiction lovers

    The fall book-publishing season mirrors the movie industry’s Oscar-jockeying season. Publishers typically use the last few weeks running up to the holiday buying season to release their most prestigious, and commercially promising, new titles. But this fall is bringing an unusually sumptuous feast for lovers of literary fiction. (Globe Staff, 9/12/09)

  • How Americans dealt with the Depression

    “I talk with the authority of failure.’’ When thinking about the popular culture of the 1930s, that icon of Jazz Age decadence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, rarely comes to mind. And yet it is Fitzgerald’s words that haunt Morris Dickstein’s judiciously researched, persuasively argued, elegant analysis of Depression culture, “Dancing in the Dark.’’ Failure was in the air - the country ... (Globe Correspondent, 9/12/09)

  • What friends are for

    One of these three novels is a thoughtful story about the mysteries of friendship and marriage. Another is a sophisticated, minutely observed comedy of manners that illuminates the decline of Britain’s upper classes. The third is a lively, sexy send-up of life among the frustrated young mothers of an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood. (Globe Correspondent, 9/12/09)

  • Taking a close look at Munson, Wie and Baseball Hall of Famers - warts and all

    Just over 30 years ago, baseball catcher Thurman Munson made a series of what the National Transportation Safety Board called “startling mistakes’’ and plunged the jet plane he had recently purchased into the ground. Overtired and inexperienced in the new plane, Munson had been practicing takeoffs and landings at the airport near his home in Canton, Ohio, when, according to ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Romagnoli’s ‘Bicycle Runner’ recalls a time of love and war

    The cuisine of G. Franco Romagnoli’s boyhood in Italy fueled his grandest successes. In the 1970s he and his wife, Margaret, hosted the PBS show “The Romagnolis’ Table,’’ out of which grew a series of cookbooks. For 10 years they owned an Italian restaurant in Faneuil Hall Marketplace. (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • ‘Monuments Men,’ ‘Venus Fixers’ recount how soldiers, scholars saved cultural treasures during WWII

    During the darkest days of World War II, a ragtag band of British and American art scholars braved the battlefields of Europe to rescue thousands of cultural treasures from Nazi pillage and the collateral damage of armed conflict. These “monuments men’’ propped up collapsing buildings; repaired battle-scarred frescoes and mosaics; guided Allied bombers away from world-renowned libraries and cathedrals; and ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Bookings

    TUESDAY: Howard Dean discusses “Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform,’’ 7 p.m., First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Harvard Square, Cambridge; tickets ($5) available online at Harvard.com, at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, or by calling 617-661-1515 . . . Josh Neufeld discusses “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge,’’ 7 p.m., Brookline Booksmith, Brookline. (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • ‘Battle for America 2008’ offers details but not big picture of presidential election

    When Barack Obama came to the Globe in December 2007 to seek the newspaper’s endorsement, he joked that competing against Hillary Clinton’s campaign was like trying to beat Microsoft with a few kids working out of a garage. Although Obama was underplaying the sophistication of his own team, the authors of the prodigiously-researched retrospective “The Battle for America 2008’’ show ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Campy gore, stoner noir provide guilty pleasure

    Pretty-boy bloodsuckers and teenage vamps are all the rage this decade, but director Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth’’) and thriller writer Chuck Hogan have devised a messy, unlovely, creepy vampire plague that may well wipe out humanity. We won’t know whether that is going to happen until book three of “The Strain ’’ is finished, but these two have certainly ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Welsh author Byron Rogers has eye for curious characters, timelessness of history

    The first time I set foot in Wales was decades ago in Holyhead at night off the mail boat from Ireland on my way to London with my friend, Andrea, whose big idea it was to hitchhike there. Getting the first ride was easy enough, only it left us in the middle of the mountains in fog and darkness on ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • ‘Wilderness Warrior’ delves into Teddy Roosevelt’s fight to conserve natural wonders

    Douglas Brinkley’s dramatic and entertaining “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America’’ tells us how an earlier generation saved endangered animal species and huge expanses of threatened wilderness. Roosevelt’s first 50 years of life can be understood anew, Brinkley argues, by concentrating on his passionate love of nature and his fight for conservation. Not quite a full ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Nicholson Baker’s ‘The Anthologist’ offers antic polemic on reasons for rhyme

    The irrepressible protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s new novel, Paul Chowder, puts it like this at one point: “You know what? I could write forever. This is me. This is me you’re getting. Nobody else but me.’’ It’s a gloss, surely, on Baker’s extraordinary literary career. (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • An interview with Lorrie Moore, author of ‘Gate at the Stairs’

    In Lorrie Moore’s breezy yet profound new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,’’ the 20-year-old narrator concludes that “to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny.’’ Viewed from Tassie Keltjin’s innocent yet ironic perspective, things are extremely funny - at first. Her farming family, her new student self, the couple that employs her as a nanny ... (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Short Takes

    From layers upon layers Dai Sijie (author of “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’’), in elegantly translated French, assembles an intricate and affecting legend of love, loss, and intellectual obsession. (Boston Globe, 9/5/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Science fiction authors from the Broad Universe Collective celebrate the birthday of the late Mary Shelley (“Frankenstein’’), 4 p.m., Back Pages Books, 289 Moody St., Waltham. (Boston Globe, 8/29/09)

  • Stephen Elliott recounts his past

    “My father may have killed a man.’’ So opens Stephen Elliott’s riveting new book, “The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder.’’ It’s the sort of line in which Elliott specializes: nakedly manipulative and all but impossible to resist. In fact, the sentence has now sucked me in twice, because the moment I revisited “The Adderall Diaries’’ (intending ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/29/09)

  • Tracing three decades of bigotry in the United States

    Humans have tremendous capacity for ignoring failure. If we can envision something, we struggle to engender it, even if generations fail in the attempt. Science fiction often furnishes inspiration for such dreaming - Jules Verne’s submarine, for instance. Then there are the race-science fictions, misbegotten fantasies of genetic purity that have inspired nightmares from the Third Reich to Southern bigotry ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/29/09)

  • Taking justice into their own hands

    Vigilante justice is getting a workout in crime fiction. The sleuth who takes the law into her own hands in Sophie Littlefield’s debut novel, “A Bad Day for Sorry,’’ is Stella Hardesty. Having dispatched her own abusive husband with the business end of a wrench, Stella takes tough and ornery to new levels. She has developed a “justice-delivering career,’’ her ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/29/09)

  • Reimagining the eccentric, pack-rat Collyers

    In the spring of 1947, New York police discovered the bodies of Homer and Langley Collyer amid 103 tons of rubbish-bound newspapers, broken umbrellas, baby carriages, even a reconstructed Model T - packed floor to ceiling in the Collyers’ once-opulent, three-story brownstone. (Globe Correspondent, 8/29/09)

  • That fantasy life

    Playing Dungeons and Dragons helped Somerville writer Ethan Gilsdorf through his adolescence in small-town New Hampshire. His family life had unraveled after his mother suffered a debilitating aneurysm. Playing the fantasy game was a welcome distraction from the sadness and loss. (Globe Correspondent, 8/29/09)

  • A retired bachelor’s life of quiet comic desperation

    In Anita Brookner’s latest novel, the protagonist, Paul Sturgis, a retired London bachelor in his early 70s, reflects on the feelings of loneliness his flat instills in him. His bedroom, the scene of romantic disappointments and troubled dreams, is a symbol of his unsatisfying, solitary life. It was, the narrator asserts, “once clamorous with denunciation, now lethally silent.’’ The language ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/29/09)

  • ‘1000 Times No’ and ‘After the Moment’ are tours de force for young readers

    The world of children’s books is an unbelievably capacious place, and anyone who doubts it should take a look at this month’s two offerings, standing as they do at opposite ends of a continuum. One has to love an art form so malleable it makes room for this much variation - it also helps explain why children’s book librarians are ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • ‘Homework for Grown-Ups’ helps brush away those intellectual cobwebs

    As schools return to session, some of us may regret all that we have learned - and lost. “Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learned at School and Promptly Forgot’’ by E. Foley and B. Coates (Broadway) fills the gaps in nine subjects, ranging from math to literature, science to art. Each chapter ends with a test; answers are provided at ... (Boston Globe, 8/22/09)

  • Pathological characters lend ‘Something Missing’ and ‘When We Were Romans’ unmistakable allure

    Recently, in the course of my investigations into what exactly is going on, I read two novels that have been compared to Mark Haddon’s prize-winning, best-selling “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’’ - a novel narrated by a boy suffering from autism, or Asperger’s syndrome at the very least. I haven’t actually read that book because I ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • Ciment’s ‘Heroic Measures’ weaves a New York tale of elderly lefties handing on

    Instead of “Heroic Measures,’’ Jill Ciment might have called her novella “New York: The View in Winter,’’ mainly for its stoically moving theme, and not incidentally, because it has the faceted perfection and ardent chill of a snowflake. (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • New Bedford’s Korolenko leads literary tour in Greenwich Village

    Alan Korolenko makes his home in New Bedford, but his heart belongs to the one-of-a-kind bookstores in Greenwich Village. Books of Wonder welcomes children of all ages. Mystery fans gravitate to Partners & Crime. At Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, chefs and armchair foodies indulge in antiquarian volumes from all over the world. (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • ‘On Kindness’ explores why we bothering being nice

    This slim volume by British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and British (Canadian-born) historian Barbara Taylor is an extended meditation on the question: Why should we be kind? Folded around this question is a more fundamental one: Why should - why do - we love at all? If “On Kindness’’ takes more than a hundred pages to arrive at, essentially, the answer ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • Hedges’s ‘Empire of Illusions’ decries decline of American culture

    Like everything but Twitter and unemployment, polemic is in decline. The genre that sustained the likes of Martin Luther, Emma Goldman, and George Orwell seems tired today, a shell of its once-formidable self. Perhaps it’s a victim of this post-Freudian, post-’60s age: It’s tough to smack slumbering readers awake when discontent is the new content, and the bourgeois shock themselves ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • Amit Chaudhuri explores desire, ambition, power in ‘The Immortals’

    In the gloriously crowded world of modern Indian fiction, Amit Chaudhuri stands out as a master craftsman who, with exquisite wit and grace, can depict a rapidly changing India in a single life and an entire life in a single detail. Best known for the novel “A New World’’ and for “Freedom Song: Three Novels,’’ Chaudhuri is also an essayist ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • Harvard men populate McDonell thriller ‘An Expensive Education’

    Harvard may not actually be the center of the universe, but this polished thriller by Nick McDonell plays along with the localized delusion that it is. (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • ‘Nantucket Reader’ and ‘Place Apart’ dip into New England’s ample literary heritage

    Two compilations, one on Nantucket and the other on Cape Cod, and a collection of essays on Hadley, are not only good companions for late-summer and early-fall “staycations’’ but also fresh reminders of the region’s rich literary heritage. (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • In ‘Strength in What Remains,’ Kidder recounts redemptive story of a young Tutsi fleeing genocide

    On Oct. 22, 1993, a sensitive young Burundian medical student working at a rural hospital was surprised to discover at the start of his shift that most of the staff had vanished. He soon learned the reason: The nation’s president, a Hutu, had been assassinated, and all over the country Hutus were killing Tutsis. (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • Author readings and signings in Greater Boston Aug. 23-29

    TODAY: Poet Nathalie Handal and others read, 4 p.m., East Lawn, Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. (Globe Correspondent, 8/22/09)

  • MacMillan’s ‘Dangerous Games’ traces revisionist histories

    For nearly two decades, Russian governments have sought a new identity for post-Soviet society by reshaping national history. Although they no longer celebrate the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, they don’t want to alienate the populace by abolishing what for so long has been a two-day holiday. So when Boris Yeltsin was in command he kept the ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • Nicholson draws lively portrait of 18th-century manners and ideas in ‘Elephant Keeper’

    “I was born, the older of two children, in the village of Thornhill, Somersetshire, in the year of our Lord 1753.’’ There is comfort and charm in that introductory sentence. Relax, it seems to say, I am a plain fellow and my story is one that you will easily understand. The wary reader may fear that the ensuing narrative will ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • In ‘Lost in Meritocracy,’ Kirn recounts a youth spent devoted to ambitious gamesmanship

    When a grief-stricken Princeton roommate reported John Lennon’s death, Walter Kirn, a hard-rock devotee and trendily disdainful, felt he ought at least to feign grief. Squeezing out a few tears, he soon found himself crying for real. “My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was the truest thing about me.’’ (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • ‘Most Beautiful Book in the World’ offer tales of redemption, reconciliation

    There is a surprising sweetness to these stories of redemption and reconciliation. They carry a slight pleasant aftertaste, a lingering hint of delight. The central characters, all women, get more than they deserve or ironically get more than they understand, often by giving more than they know. Their consolations, transformations, unintended gifts, are rewards for them and for a reader as well. (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • ‘Best iPhone Apps’ provides tips on how to pump up Apple cellphone

    Josh Clark, a software developer living in Paris, loves his iPhone. He tested thousands of applications to find the most useful 200. In “ Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders’’ (O’Reilly), Clark organizes his finds into 13 categories, ranging from “Getting Stuff Done at Work’’ to “Distracting the Kids.’’ There’s an app for achieving a Zen-like calm, for ... (Boston Globe, 8/15/09)

  • Patriot elation

    Brian Kinchen’s pro football career ended abruptly after 13 years. While the 35-year-old was recovering from knee surgery, the Carolina Panthers replaced him with a younger player. (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • Pat Conroy’s Southern Gothic ‘South of Broad’ has rusty patches

    In the great Southern tradition of storytelling, the city of Charleston, S.C., is the principal “character’’ in Pat Conroy’s new novel, “South of Broad.’’ Like the Southern Gothic masters, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Conroy understands that a compelling sense of place will lend grace to his narrative, inhabiting the minds of his readers like the mournful strains of an ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • Flanagan ‘Wanting’ is a poorly wrought Victorian soap opera

    “Wanting’’ is a novel, 19th-century in location and characters, that involves historical figures: Sir John Franklin, the famed polar explorer and governor of Van Dieman’s Land and his wife, Lady Jane; the novelist Charles Dickens, and actress Ellen Ternan. It also involves a young Aboriginal girl named Mathinna Flinders, a sort of American Topsy, who, something of a legend in ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • Bookings

    MONDAY: Novelist Elizabeth Strout (“Olive Kitteridge’’) and artist Anthony Kirk speak at 7 p.m., Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown. (Globe Correspondent, 8/15/09)

  • Carter’s ‘Jericho Fall’ weaves tangled tale of former lovers, national security threat

    Sometimes when I’m reading a novel by Stephen L. Carter, I feel a bit like that kid who has the X-Men comic book hidden behind the geometry textbook. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • In ‘That Old Cape Magic,’ Russo meditates on marriage, other family ties

    Sitting at a “leftover table’’ at the wedding of his daughter’s best friend, Jack Griffin, the main character in Richard Russo’s new novel, pumps his fist in solidarity with the young people on the dance floor, as they shout the refrain of a Jon Bon Jovi tune: “Oh-oh! We’re halfway there.’’ Worried that his wife, Joy, was right - that ... (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Locked up inside the mind of a killer

    In her extraordinary new novel, “This is How’’ (Canongate), M.J. Hyland seals us inside the troubled mind of Patrick Oxtby, an alienated young car mechanic who moves into an English seaside boarding house and immediately finds his fellow lodgers disturbing, even threatening. A killing occurs, and Hyland takes us into prison, describing it and the incarcerated state of mind with ... (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Author’s life in Lebanon infuses ‘A Girl Made of Dust’

    Nathalie Abi-Ezzi was born in Lebanon in 1972 and emigrated with her family a decade later after Israeli troops invaded in pursuit of their Palestinian adversaries. It is a history that infuses “A Girl Made of Dust,’’ her first novel. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Vollmann’s ‘Imperial’ takes readers to dark Mexico-US border region

    “Imperial’’ appears to be a book about people and places in the California-Mexico borderland, but it might be best described as a bunch of books and a raft of notes, arranged in a way only the author could explain, though he doesn’t. Why would readers want to pay $55 to plough through a dense, weirdly organized volume of more than ... (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Heavier fare for a light season

    It is not exactly light summer listening, but Paul Griner’s unsentimental and realistic look at the fallout of war, “The German Woman,’’ is so compelling it is hard to unplug. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: The New England Poetry Club presents a 200th Birthday Remembrance of Poe, Tennyson, and Longfellow, 4 p.m., East Lawn, Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Two more works by Justin Cartwright make US debut

    It is a great mystery to me why the South African-born, London-dwelling novelist Justin Cartwright is not better known in this country. I was put on to him by a friend last year, and since then have insisted that a number of my other friends read him. All who did have been impressed, even smitten, and one has made securing ... (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Timothy Black profiles three Puerto Rican brothers in ‘When a Heart Turns Rock Solid’

    Prison, drug addiction, and gangs have defined the lives of three ethnic Puerto Rican brothers profiled in “When a Heart Turns Rock Solid’’ (Pantheon). Fausto, Sammy, and Julio were raised in Springfield, a declining industrial city where half of all Puerto Rican students in the late 1980s dropped out. Neither of the boys’ parents graduated from high school, and Fausto, at 15, could not read or write in Spanish or English. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • ‘Last of His Kind’ recounts life of mountaineer Bradford Washburn

    We think of him atop some peak in the Alps or Alaska, or in the bend of a glacier, or holding a flag in a snowfield, or occasionally in his office atop the Boston Museum of Science, a man half mountaineer and half myth, a figure from the recent past but really a pathfinder from another age. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • An outsider’s look inside groups and gripes

    Arthur Goldwag writes entertaining and erudite encyclopedias. His “’Isms and ’Ologies’’ defines hundreds of movements and religions that have shaped the world. He moves to more secular territory with his new book, “Cults, Conspiracies, & Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Black Helicopters, the New World Order, and Many, Many More’’ (Vintage, paperback, $16), ... (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • In Dunant’s ‘Sacred Hearts,’ a story of thwarted love and church intrigue

    Any of these three books would make for good vacation reading. The first is an engrossing novel set in a 16th-century Italian convent, the second a wonderfully imaginative story about an Arab-American family, and the third a funny tale of girlfriends gone wrong. (Boston Globe, 8/8/09)

  • Like its subject, ‘Byron in Love’ is flawed

    Byron became famous in his early 20s and has remained famous ever since. Edna O’Brien’s “Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life’’ pays homage to that fame - particularly around his romantic conquests - and seeks to illuminate his mercurial nature. I should confess that, prior to reading this book, I knew shamefully little about Byron. At school we studied ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • Pynchon’s ‘Inherent Vice’ delivers manic requiem for ’60s-’70s

    In a way, I suppose, you could say that Thomas Pynchon has gone on holiday to write a playful private eye story. But that would mislead. (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • ‘Keep Your Head Down’ recounts veteran’s post-Vietnam War journey to find himself again

    KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery By Doug Anderson Norton, 288 pp., $25.95 (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • Nathan Rabin’s ‘The Big Rewind’ is a funny memoir of a not so amusing childhood

    The proliferation of memoirs in the past decade has turned a formerly staid genre, once the province of wizened statesmen and dowager queens, into a young person’s form. Thirty-year-olds - heck, freshly minted college graduates - see no contradiction in their first published work being a memoir. Lest one point the accusatory finger and ask just what these authors might ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • Aleksandar Hemon spins dark, dreamlike tales of ‘Love and Obstacles’

    “The dream involved danger, pain, and mystery, although there was also an encounter with a woman.’’ That one sentence, square in the middle of Aleksandar Hemon’s collection of linked stories, just about sums up this marvelous and original writer’s fiction, which again and again steers a hallucinatory path through dark and forbidding - but nevertheless enticing - terrain. (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • ‘Die-Hard Sports Fan’s Guide to Boston’ dishes out advice on anything from scoring tickets to autographs

    “The Die-Hard Sports Fan’s Guide to Boston’’ by Christopher Klein (Union Park, paperback, $17.95) is a handy primer for the sports-bewildered. It begins with a bucket list of 10 sporting events before focusing on the big four: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Klein, raised in New York until his family moved to Greater Boston when he was in the sixth ... (Boston Globe, 8/1/09)

  • Titcom’s Bookshop in East Sandwich celebrates 40th anniversary

    In the summer of 1969, Nancy and Ralph Titcomb settled in East Sandwich with their eight children and opened a used-book store next door. (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • Author readings and signings in Greater Boston, Aug. 3-7

    MONDAY: Lydia Peelle reads from “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,’’ 7 p.m., Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline . . . Poet Ralph Angel , novelist Colum McCann, and artist Peik Larsen speak, 7 p.m., Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown. (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • Three self-help books on becoming a better parent and person

    What if your core beliefs about yourself or others are not reality based? You might fret that your solitary son is an outcast who needs prodding to socialize, but what if he is really a contented loner, and being with groups of kids makes him miserable? Someone might ask you, “Have you gained weight?’’ and instantly you imagine you are ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/1/09)

  • ‘Age of Wonder’ looks at how science inspired Romantic poets

    A decade ago the British writer Richard Holmes completed his two-volume biographical study of Coleridge. It was widely and rightly praised. There was a match between author and subject not just in intellectual spark but also in Romantic sensibility, and the result was a near masterpiece of empathy. Though Holmes’s scholarship was rigorous and prodigiously researched, his voice at times ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Short takes

    THE GERBIL FARMER’S DAUGHTER By Holly Robinson, Harmony, 304 pp., $23 It sounds like an intriguing title for a novel - “The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter’’ - but in fact it is a memoir of a mid-century American upbringing typical enough in all respects but one. Holly Robinson’s father, a naval officer, had a dream that took outsized shape as the ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Every story shines in Meloy’s collection ‘Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It’

    If parents insist on loving their children equally, readers don’t feel the same way about an author’s work. “I prefer your first,’’ the novelist hears at the launch party of her third. “Your fifth is my favorite’’ will be reported as the tenth hits bookstore shelves. To the novelist, it’s the new baby that counts; everything else is just so ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Three New England literary groups receive stimulus-bill grants

    Brookline-based Zephyr Press publishes poetry from Romania, Poland, China, Korea, and elsewhere. Each book includes the original work as well as the translation. (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Historian Strachey delights in his research work for 'Brave Vessel'

    Four hundred years ago this month, the Sea Venture, one of nine ships sailing from England to the Jamestown colony in Virginia, was wrecked off Bermuda. Its castaways lived on the island for 10 months before setting sail again for the colony. Among them was the aspiring writer William Strachey (ancestor of Lytton Strachey), whose account of the ordeal became ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Conroy’s ‘War Stories’ spotlights depiction of war in comics

    “War Stories: A Graphic History’’ (Collins Design, $24.95) by Mike Conroy is a fascinating look at armed conflict as it has been rendered over time in the pages of comic books. Conroy, editor of a monthly comics review, roams widely, touching on the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolution, World Wars I and II, as well as conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, ... (Boston Globe, 7/25/09)

  • Author readings and signings in Greater Boston

    TODAY: Andre Dubus III (“The Garden of Lost Days’’) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson (“The True History of Paradise’’) read, 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St. . . . David Farley discusses “An Irreverent Curiosity,’’ 7 p.m., Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner . . . Poet Paul Muldoon reads, 4 p.m., Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 7/25/09)

  • ‘Third Reich in the Ivory Tower’ examines response of US colleges to Nazis

    In 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, where rampaging Nazis assaulted thousands of Jews, ransacked synagogues, and wrecked thousands of businesses, a poll revealed that almost 70 percent of students in colleges and universities in the United States opposed offering their country as a haven for Jewish refugees in Central Europe. (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Celebrating Gogol and the power of irony by revisiting 'The Collected Tales'

    Somehow it escaped my attention until now that this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Gogol. The actual date of this happy event was in March, either the 19th or the 31st depending on whether you consult the Julian or the Gregorian calendar. In any case, I have been celebrating this bicentennial by reading “The Collected ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • Lifting a pint to the late, great Westlake

    Endings are hard, and I took my time reading “Get Real,’’ knowing that it’s the last Dortmunder novel from Donald Westlake. In this one, the mellow, amiable New York City thief and his colorful buddies get sucked into doing what they do for a reality show. (Globe Correspondent, 7/25/09)

  • David Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel ‘Asterios Polyp’ is wildly imaginative

    David Mazzucchelli’s stunning opus is of the magnum, embracing kind, and in that sense serves as an appropriate lead-in to a sweeping roundup of Grafix Americana, including the diverse anthology “Syncopated,’’ the despairing, nurturing “A.D.,’’ and “Cla$$war,’’ a striking variation on the superhero genre. (Boston Globe, 7/25/09)

  • A writer in full, fiercely political with a life of high drama

    In the remarkably short span from 1947 to 1955, Arthur Miller completed five plays that made him famous: “All My Sons,’’ “Death of Salesman,’’ “An Enemy of the People,’’ “The Crucible,’’ and “A View from the Bridge.’’ (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • Building castles in the sand

    Lucinda Wierenga is one of the few people in the world who makes a living building sandcastles. A winner of international competitions, she also teaches classes on her techniques on South Padre Island, Texas, where she lives. Her book “Sandcastles Made Simple’’ (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $16.95), just out in paperback, offers step-by-step instructions on the equipment and methods required ... (Boston Globe, 7/18/09)

  • Short takes

    “Censorship drives a poet or a writer to abstain from superficiality and to instead delve into the layers and depths of love and relationships and achieve a level of creativity that Western poets and writers cannot even dream of.’’ (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: M.E. Roche reads from “Mystery at Marian Manor,’’ 2 p.m., Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge . . . Jennifer Weiner reads from “Best Friends Forever,’’ 3 p.m., Barnes & Noble, 1 Worcester Road, Framingham. (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • Back to Yasgur’s farm

    Forty years later, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair seems like a faint, faraway dream. Tickets to the event were surely a dream by modern standards. A one-day pass cost $7 - less than the cost of a beer at the Comcast Center now. And all three days cost $18 - more than $300 less than a good seat to ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • An insightful, if worshipful, look at Albert Camus

    CAMUS, A ROMANCE By Elizabeth Hawes Grove, 304 pp., illustrated, $25 In the pantheon of photogenic writers with auras, Albert Camus shares the dais with Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, no question. Camus, with his trench coat, Gauloises, and Bogart mien. In my high school crowd, I remember, our epithet of highest praise was: “Existential!’’ We were thinking of Camus ... (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • The Heidi Klum of calculations

    E=mc{+2} is the supermodel of equations. It’s a fashion brand and a Mariah Carey album. Sculptures are made out of it; energy drinks are named for it. The formula is 104 years old, but it’s still sexy, if you know what I mean. (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • A post-Katrina comedy of middle-class inaction

    American anomie is Frederick Barthelme’s specialty (its gastronomic equivalent would be Spam), but Rudyard Kipling was there 100 years earlier with his Just-So story “How the Camel Got His Hump.’’ (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • Google's goals

    Google’s plan to digitize millions of books has stirred a controversy of epic proportions. Critics say the company’s project amounts to a monopoly that offers too little to authors. Proponents herald the access to vast stores of knowledge. Earlier this month, the US Justice Department entered the fray when it launched an antitrust investigation into the matter. (Globe Correspondent, 7/18/09)

  • A wide-ranging and clear-eyed examination of the history of American conservatism

    For more than half a century, historians, sociologists, journalists, psychologists, political scientists, and philosophers have studied, probed, analyzed, pondered, attacked, lauded, and attempted to explain that force that is American political conservatism. Sometimes this avalanche of books, articles, and op-eds has veered weirdly into the realms of psychobabble (once a group of left-leaning psychiatrists, without ever meeting or talking to ... (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • ‘A Brave Vessel’ tells the story of obscure writer who inspired Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’

    Traveling to London, Bermuda, and Jamestown, Va., a Massachusetts historian has pieced together a tale of shipwreck and the obscure writer who inspired William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.’’ (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • In ‘Swimming,’ ‘Girl in a Blue Dress’ and ‘Heart of the Canyon,’ souls cast adrift seek anchor

    Nicola Keegan’s novel about a young swimmer is enthralling. Gaynor Arnold’s historical fiction was inspired by the plight of Charles Dickens’s abandoned wife, Catherine. And Elisabeth Hyde sends readers on an excellent armchair adventure by raft, through the Grand Canyon. (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Listening that beckons in a lazy season

    Historical nonfiction doesn’t usually head a list of summer audiobooks, but there is nothing ordinary about “The State of Jones.’’ Journalist Sally Jenkins and historian John Stauffer teamed up to write about a little known but fascinating slice of American history: the secession of a Mississippi county from the Confederacy during the Civil War. (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Tales of Nigerian outsiders, trapped between two worlds

    Anger. Defensiveness. The feeling of being unloved, unwanted, undesired. Above all, the nagging sensation that your story - your truth - is being stifled by flashier, louder tales. “The Thing Around Your Neck,’’ pointedly, is not relegated to an impersonal, unspecific other; it’s closing ever tighter around your neck, too, buster, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is intent that you don’t ... (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Celebrating a father’s daze

    It’s too late for this year. But let’s imagine you’ve already decided to buy Dad a nice fragile something or other for next Father’s Day. The key term here is “fragile,’’ because it seems our post-literate, Internet content-provider times have rendered even a solid, old-fashioned noun like “book’’ as frangible as a Fabergé egg. (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • ‘From Square One’ sails into world of crossword aficionados

    Dean Olsher, late of public radio, makes some extravagant claims on behalf of crossword puzzles. In solving crosswords, he says, we turn off “that part of the brain . . . telling us we’re not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough.’’ We escape loneliness and depression. In short, “crosswords are vital to our well-being.’’ (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • In ‘Thrumpton Hall’ and ‘A Meaningful Life,’ houses become twisted and comic obsessions

    The best book I’ve ever read about a house is V.S. Naipaul’s novel “A House for Mr. Biswas.’’ (“Gone with the Wind’’ and “Brideshead Revisited’’ are, in their own ways, among the worst.) But some stiff competition has just emerged in the shape of Miranda Seymour’s “Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House’’ (Harper Perennial, paperback, $14.95). ... (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Mortgage meltdown

    When Ned Gramlich was a Federal Reserve Board governor a decade ago, he became alarmed about the proliferation of subprime mortgages in the US banking system. According to Gramlich, he urged Alan Greenspan, then the Federal Reserve chairman, to crack down on the practice. (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Author signings and readings in Greater Boston

    TODAY: Poet Charles Simic reads, 4 p.m., Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge . . . Paul Yoon (“Once the Shore’’) and Dave King (“The Ha-Ha’’) read, 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s debut novel draws on her youthful memories of war-torn Lebanon

    In her affecting and assured first novel, “A Girl Made of Dust’’ (Grove, $24), Nathalie Abi-Ezzi lyrically evokes village life in rural Lebanon during that country’s civil war and on the eve of the Israeli invasion of 1983. Through the eyes of 8-year-old Ruba, we see her father haunted by the memory of a murdered child and her tiny community ... (Boston Globe, 7/12/09)

  • Short Takes

    These wonderful, surprising essays are divided into two groups: Critical and autobiographical, but they all feel personal. (Boston Globe, 7/4/09)

  • Lions of Victorian theatre

    He has written at least three biographical masterpieces: of Lytton Strachey, George Bernard Shaw, and of himself and his parents. So Michael Holroyd must have found it tempting to tackle in “A Strange Eventful History’’ those most colorful deities of Victorian theater: the much-worshiped Ellen Terry and her formidable actor-manager, Sir Henry Irving, along with each one’s two children. (Boston Globe, 7/4/09)

  • A bullet in darkness

    Shahriar Mandanipour, a visiting scholar at Harvard, opens a window on his native, troubled Iran with a new novel about love and censorship. (Boston Globe, 7/4/09)

  • Literary Boston neighborhoods

    The authors who have captured the sights and sounds of Boston over several hundred years did not limit themselves to locations on Beacon Hill and in town. In search of subjects and themes, they ventured further afield to the city's neighborhoods, to Allston and Brighton, to Charlestown and the South End, to Dorchester and Roxbury, to the furthest corners of ... (Globe Staff, 7/5/09)

  • Some of the giants of the games

    During one 11-year period in his reign over the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner fired his manager 12 times, setting what Peter Golenbock calls “a record for destructive, frivolous management.’’ (Boston Globe, 7/4/09)

  • Separation anxiety

    Jay Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, lectures on church-state issues of sufficient constitutional weight to reach the US Supreme Court. During a sabbatical, he sets out to parlay his lecture notes into a book that even people who would rather drink hemlock than read Supreme Court opinions might enjoy. (Boston Globe, 7/4/09)

  • Author readings and book signings in and around Boston

    MONDAY: Joey Kramer signs “Hit Hard,’’ at 7 p.m., Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner . . . Short-story writer Pamela Painter and artist Robert Henry speak at 7 p.m., Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown. (Boston Globe, 7/4/09)

  • ‘Evolution of God’ makes case for cooperative monotheism

    Count on Robert Wright to place whatever he examines under the microscope of evolutionary theory. (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • In ‘The Last Supper,’ author sweeps her family off to adventure in Italy

    Oppressed by a vague malaise - the sense, perhaps, of being fitted too soon for the shroud of suburban routine - British novelist Rachel Cusk swept her husband and their two small daughters off to adventure in Italy. Here, she thought she might learn to be someone who was not entirely herself. (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • Advantages and annoyances of being tall

    THE TALL BOOK: A Celebration of Life from on High By Arianne Cohen Bloomsbury, 257 pp., illustrated, $20 (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • ‘And Then There’s This’ explores chaotic, democratizing power of Internet

    To understand the complex, important message of Bill Wasik's book, it helps to reflect upon Seamus, the late Irish setter of Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and White House aspirant. (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • ‘Niki: The Story of a Dog’ recounts fragile ties of love, loyalty in post-war Hungary

    For almost a year now I have been conducting a correspondence of sorts with one of the dogs who lives with my sister and her husband in Ireland. His name is Milo, and though not especially brainy, he has a noble and generous soul and a kindly sense of humor. He takes aesthetic pleasure in rolling in fox dung and ... (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • ‘Story Sister’ lacks spark of Alice Hoffman’s earlier works

    As the eldest of three sisters, I am always interested in books about sisters, like this new novel from Alice Hoffman. (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • Author readings and discussions in Greater Boston

    TODAY: Dick Lehr reads from “The Fence,’’ 3 p.m., Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord . . . Christopher Lydon, X.J. Kennedy , and F.D. Reeve present a “Salute to John Updike,’’ 4 p.m., Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge . . . Roxana Robinson (“Cost’’) and Joan Wickersham (“The Suicide Index’’) read, 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 ... (Boston Globe, 6/27/09)

  • An interview with Caroline Moorehead, author of ‘Dancing to the Precipice’

    Caroline Moorehead is best known for biographies of Bertrand Russell and Martha Gellhorn and, more recently, for “Human Cargo: A Journey Among the Refugees.’’ (She cofounded a UK legal advice center for African asylum seekers.) Moorehead’s latest book , “Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour Du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era’’ (Harper, $27.99), is an ... (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • Young adults feel affinity with supernatural characters in books

    It’s impossible to talk about new trends in young-adult fiction without considering the wildly popular supernatural fiction - much of it terrible knock-offs of the “Twilight’’ series by Stephenie Meyer. One surprising fact remains: Meyer can write beautiful prose, and she creates characters that young people care passionately about. (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • Light, frothy mayhem for a steamy season

    It's officially summer, and many new crime novels will make great beach reads - they keep you entertained but won't keep you up nights. (Globe Correspondent, 6/27/09)

  • Author readings in Boston area June 21-27

    TODAY: Adam Ried discusses “Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes,’’ 2 p.m., Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge . . . J. Courtney Sullivan reads from “Commencement,’’ 3 p.m., Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • 'Idiot America' takes aim at visceral appeal of right wing

    Charles Pierce has had it with America. In "Idiot America," his idiosyncratic and rambling survey of the headlined events of recent years, Pierce is apoplectically aghast at what has become of the nation. (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • 'Morning Glory' features recipes from Martha's Vineyard farm and chefs

    Morning Glory Farm is among the biggest and best-loved businesses on Martha’s Vineyard. On summer mornings, customers line up before the farmstand opens. Corn is a big seller, as is the signature zucchini bread. (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • 'Brodeck,' 'Secret Alchemy' and 'Proper Education of Girls' provide lenses into history

    Countless dramas - from Sophocles's plays to Clint Eastwood's movies - have taught us that the arrival of a stranger in town can spell trouble. In Philippe Claudel's disturbing new novel, "Brodeck," a spasm of such violence has already passed. (Boston Globe, 6/20/09)

  • 'Language of Things' explores our relationship with designed objects

    This fascinating study considers our relationship to the objects we enjoy, use, covet, reject, and display, such as chairs, lamps, cars, laptops, and watches. "Design," Deyan Sudjic writes, "is the language that a society uses to create objects that reflect its purposes and its values." (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • Writers trace the powerful ties to their brothers

    BROTHERS: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry Edited by Andrew Blauner Jossey-Bass, 304 pp., $24.95 (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • Will, we hardly knew ye - and still don't

    SOUL OF THE AGE: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare By Jonathan Bate Random House, 496 pp., illustrated, $35 (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • Aerialist's stunt links tales of characters struggling to make their way

    New York City is Antaeus ground for Colum McCann: When he touches down, a surge of strength courses up. When he moves elsewhere (as in his unfocused "Zoli," set in the Balkans) or when he elaborates beyond a spirit of place into complexities of character and plot, he tends to strain. (Boston Globe, 6/21/09)

  • 'Kerouac at Bat' explores beat author's passion for fantasy baseball

    From boyhood on, Lowell author Jack Kerouac loved to create fantasy baseball games. In “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats ’’ (New York Public Library, $25), author Isaac Gewirtz, a curator of American literature at the library, suggests that Kerouac’s hobby may have been instrumental in his development as a writer. Throughout his life, Kerouac ... (Globe Staff, 6/21/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Charles Pierce discusses "Idiot America," 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville . . . Jack McLean reads from "Loon: A Marine Story," 3 p.m., Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord . . . Wendy Mnookin , Jonathan Weinert, and student winners of the Helen Creeley Award read, 3 to 5 p.m., Concord Poetry Center, 40 Stow St., ... (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • 'Pleasures and Sorrows of Work' examines meaning behind the daily grind

    Driving aimlessly in the Mojave Desert, Alain de Botton, author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "The Architecture of Happiness," stumbled across an airport, with a hangar, two Cessnas, and a landing strip. (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • 'Obama's Blackberry' parodies the famous and powerful

    The fine new parody "Obama's BlackBerry" (Little, Brown, $13.99) targets the rivalries and foibles of politicians and celebrities alike. Apart from a few missives purported to be from Abe Lincoln, the San Francisco-based Kasper Hauser comedy team has written a pitch-perfect set of high-level text messages and e-mails. Bill Clinton asks Barack Obama to send Hillary out of the country ... (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • The dark comedy of life in distant, corrupt lands

    "When it comes to . . . black-marketing, counterfeiting, and corruption, we are the world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver, and bronze in those three." If you read Aravind Adiga's brilliant, Man Booker Prize winning novel, "The White Tiger," it will not surprise you to learn that these sentiments are ... (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • Reviews of 'That Mad Ache', 'Notes on Sontag' and 'A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy'

    The late Françoise Sagan, a name redolent of Gauloises and chagrin d'amour, speaks to us across four decades of changing manners and mores in this new translation of her 1965 novel "La Chamade" by Douglas Hofstadter, a best-selling author in his own right. (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • A Cape crash, and after

    Thirty years ago this week, a small Air New England passenger plane crashed deep in the Cape Cod woods on a foggy night. Pilot George Parmenter, who had worked a 14-hour day after being called in on an extra shift, was killed. (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • Poking fun at kiddie classics, Lear, and romance writers

    Lois Lowry has written all manner of novels for children and young adults over the years, from fantasy and historical fiction to humor. A few have been challenging, some even controversial. But one never thought of her audiobooks as cleverly snarky or riotously funny. Until now. (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • An interview with Robert Wilson on the evolution of Inspector Falcon

    In his gripping new novel, "The Ignorance of Blood" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Robert Wilson concludes the exceptionally fine Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón series that he began in 2003 with "The Blind Man of Seville." Here Falcón, still haunted by an unsolved terrorist bombing in Seville, investigates a Russian mafia case that quickly ensnares those he loves. Soon crimes of the ... (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • Recessionary reads: Hunker down with old favorites

    Most of us are going to lowball summer this year. A walk on the wild side will be a night at the drive-in. No Umbria, no Cotswolds. And, for my part, no new exorbitantly priced hardcovers. Instead, I will wallow in the joys of rereading my favorite books. (Globe Staff, 6/13/09)

  • 'Fordlandia' recounts auto tycoon's doomed attempt to establish rubber plantations in Amazon

    FORDLANDIA: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City By Greg Grandin Metropolitan, 416 pp., illustrated, $27.50 (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • John Updike's final collection plumbs familiar themes, place of the heart

    The blurb for John Updike's last collection of stories finds him in a "valedictory mood," words that speak truly to the stories, individually and collectively. (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • Family ties, mystery, and great summer reading

    The first of these novels is a moving but remarkably unsentimental story about one family's life after 9/11. The second is an ingenious exploration of an enduring historical mystery. The two others are pure escapism, perfect summer reading. (Boston Globe, 6/13/09)

  • '100 Best Volunteer Vacations' offers getaways that nourish body and soul

    You might decide to track jaguars in Brazil, open your heart to AIDS orphans in Zambia, or restore medieval stonework in France. National Geographic's "The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations to Enrich Your Life" promises a trip you'll never forget - and one that will make the world a better place. Author Pam Grout spans the globe with programs aimed at ... (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • A 19th-century adventurer's unsentimental education

    There are novels so finely constructed that they propel you back to the beginning at the moment you reach the end. Instead of closing the covers, you return to the first page with fresh eyes. Iliya Troyanov's "The Collector of Worlds" is a wonderfully sumptuous example. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Three poets defy simple pigeonholing

    It's surely a sign of the times that you could compile a veritable field guide of estimable poets in recent generations who fit that general description in one form or another and are impossible to pigeonhole under any one cultural provenance or literary tradition. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • 'New Global Student,' 'You Majored in What?', 'How to Love' provide different ways of learning

    Crushing college costs and an unfriendly job market getting you down? Maybe it's time to look at the future a little differently. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Authorized biography of Gabriel García Márquez

    For a handcuffed guy, Gerald Martin is quite good at maneuvering like a detective in search of a clue. "Gabriel García Márquez: A Life" is an admirable example of the can't-be-with-you-can't-be-without-you paradigm: It doesn’t fall flat under the sign of the "authorized" seal, although it lacks the epic sweep that a chronicle about the 1982 Nobel Prize winner and author of the magisterial "One Hundred Years of Solitude" would require. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Catching a glimpse of reading's future at Book Expo

    NEW YORK - Book publishing and reading are clearly amid sweeping transition. The industry has been struggling with sagging sales and is looking for cheaper and more efficient ways to deliver content to readers who want more flexibility in how they buy and read, whether on paper or a handheld device. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Reviews of 'The American Painter,' 'Origin of Stories,' 'The Bolter'

    Silver haired and long legged, Emma Dial works as an assistant to a famous painter. She travels with his downtown New York crowd of artists, dealers, collectors, film directors, actors, musicians, and models. She is the assistant, the one who carries the burden of the work - provides the youth, the talent, the sexual energy, the actual brushstrokes. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Marblehead messenger

    Katherine Howe's interest in the Salem witch trials is more than academic. A doctoral candidate in New England studies at Boston University, Howe is a descendant of two accused witches. Yet it wasn't until she moved to Marblehead that she felt the full force of New England's past, leading to her novel, "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane" (Voice), being ... (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Alain de Botton ("The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work") speaks, 2:30 p.m., Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave.; for tickets ($12), 617-478-3103 or www.icaboston.org. (Boston Globe, 6/6/09)

  • Where Boston's the backdrop

    If you're going to spend 24 hours and a small fortune on an audiobook, then it had better be worth the time and money. Thankfully, Dennis Lehane's lengthy "The Given Day" was worth the wait and the time it takes to listen to it. (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • An interview with Philip Matyszak on 'Legionary'

    In his latest book, "Legionary: The Roman Soldier's (Unofficial) Manual" (Thames & Hudson, $24.95)," Philip Matyszak tells the potential recruit what to expect in the Roman Army in 100 AD with chapters such as "How to Storm a City" and "People Who Will Want to Kill You." A fascinating little handbook of serious scholarship and irrepressible wit, "Legionary" vividly illuminates ... (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • They paved paradise

    PARADISE FOUND: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery By Steve Nicholls University of Chicago, 536 pp., $30 (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • The Celtics' odd couple

    Celtics legend Bill Russell has now penned "Red and Me," a warm and thoughtful celebration of their longer friendship. He describes an evolving relationship built on mutual respect. (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • 'Thousands of Broadways,' 'Perforated Heart,' 'Blue Hour' reviewed

    Now that Main Street - or its alter ego Broadway - has moved to the mini-mall, small-town America exists more as a metaphor than a reality. But, notes poet and critic Robert Pinsky in these compact lecture-essays, there has always been a broad streak of myth surrounding the reality of life in these burgs. (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • A meditation on loss and remembrance of things past

    Forget what you think you know about how novels are supposed to work. "The Winter Vault" doesn't work that way. There are characters - Avery Escher, a British-born engineer, and Jean, his Canadian wife - but the book really isn't about them. The true main characters are history, memory, and loss. (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • 'In the Land of Invented Languages' tries to dismantle tower of babble

    Of all the reformers, visionaries, and crackpots who have trod the earth, I have the greatest fondness for the busy bees who set about the task of constructing - or, in a few cases, rediscovering - a universal language. Friends to humanity, they took it upon themselves to do something about the inaccuracy, inconsistency, arbitrariness, redundancy, and exclusiveness that are ... (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • 'K Blows Top' recounts Khrushchev's bizarre US tour in 1959

    I plan to dedicate the second half of my life to a new cause: books that are fun to read. I am going to review and promote books that promise maximum enjoyment. "K Blows Top," by former Boston Herald-American and Washington Post writer Peter Carlson fits the bill. (Globe Staff, 5/30/09)

  • 'Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie' serves up a pig-tailed sleuth

    British author Alan Bradley's witty debut novel "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" delivers a delightful new sleuth. A combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes, Flavia de Luce is a fearless, cheeky, wildly precocious 11-year-old whose "particular passion is poison." (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • 'Mission to the Moon' out just in time for anniversary of first lunar stroll

    Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and the first lunar stroll comes "Missions to the Moon: The Complete Story of Man's Greatest Adventure" (Sterling, $40). Aficionados will savor the 150 photographs of key players and the missions but likely will find this volume is a little light on text. What promises to amuse, though, ... (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Dr. Elise Lemire reads from "Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts," 3 p.m., Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St. . . . . Alice Hoffman reads from "The Story Sisters," 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St. (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • Writers pay tribute to John Updike

    June is John Updike month. Writers will pay tribute in Boston and Cambridge to their prolific North Shore friend whose final book, "My Father's Tears and Other Stories" (Knopf), will be published Tuesday. The stories in Updike's new collection encompass the sweep of time from the Great Depression through the aftermath of 9/11. (Boston Globe, 5/30/09)

  • Bookings

    TUESDAY: Greer Gilman reads from "Cloud & Ashes," 7 p.m., Back Pages Books, 289 Moody St., Waltham . . . . Peter Abrahams discusses "Reality Check," 7 p.m., Wellesley Booksmith, 82 Central St., Wellesley . . . Danzy Senna ("Where Did You Sleep Last Night?") speaks at 6 p.m., Boston Public Library . . . Hal Niedzviecki discusses "The Peep ... (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • Looking to America's past to find a path for the future

    "This is the time to stand for things that are close to the American spirit," George McGovern proclaimed in 1972 as he accepted the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. McGovern promised to take on wasteful military spending, entrenched special interests, prejudice based on race and sex, and the despair of the old and sick. "Come home America," he pleaded, "to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning." (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • 'On the Origin of Stories,' 'Finding Our Tongues,' 'Catching Fire' take path-breaking looks at survival of fittest

    A few years ago Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett opined that the idea of natural selection - proposed 150 years ago in Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" - was "the best idea anybody ever had." The flood of books published this year to celebrate the sesquicentennial would seem to prove Dennett right. (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • Schloss's 'Foundation' gets inside hip-hop dance tradition

    Lesson one: Don't call it breakdancing. Hip-hop's dance tradition, the kinetic counterpart to the soundscape of rap music and the visuals of graffiti art, is properly known as b-boying. (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • 'Call of the Coast' catalogs 80 paintings of New England coast

    At this time of year, artists are often drawn to the sparkling New England coast. It was no different in the early 20th century, when painters gathered at colonies from Maine to Connecticut to create a sublime variety of impressions. About 80 of these paintings - by Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, and others - have been collected in "Call of ... (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • 'Weller's War' collects foreign correspondent's reports from WWII

    George Weller, a Boston native and novelist, eventually became a fearless and prolific World War II correspondent. He filed eyewitness accounts from battlegrounds and beachheads and chronicled feats of heroism and humanity, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his account of submarine crewmen performing an appendectomy. (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • Reynolds Price crafts a rich memoir in 'Ardent Spirits'

    ARDENT SPIRITS: Leaving Home, Coming Back By Reynolds Price Scribner, 416 pp., $35 My favorite story in this richly detailed memoir, one that Reynolds Price says he often passes on to students, is of a dying woman who rises from her final coma to tell her son, "I only regret my economies." This advice has been useful to Price in ... (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • Bachelor father

    Since Elinor Lipman's is a moral universe where wrongs are righted, it seems natural - and therefore just - that the daughter whom Henry Archer lost when she was 3 should reappear. "The Family Man" of the title lost custody for no good reason: He's gay, the nonbiological parent, and times were what they were. (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • Speigelman's 'Seven Pleasures' celebrates ordinary happiness

    Willard Spiegelman loves to dance, swim, and take long walks, but he is not a performer, athlete, or advocate of avid exercise. These activities simply bring him pleasure, so he indulges in them. (Boston Globe, 5/24/09)

  • More multicultural offerings at Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge

    Ten years ago, a single shelf at Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge was devoted to novels set in foreign cultures. Today there's an entire section - and that's not even counting mysteries set in Britain and Ireland. (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • Reviews of 'A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings,' 'All the News Unfit to Print '

    When the subject of A.J. Liebling comes up, people usually talk about his exuberant pieces on boxing. In fact, the only thing I like about boxing is Liebling's way of writing about it: his easy swing and occasional sesquipedalian pomp; his liberality in recording the pensées of its "pugilant heroes" and their followers; and his overall kindliness. Then people talk ... (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • 'The Survival Handbook' offers tips on roughing it outdoors

    Whether you're embarking on an arduous overseas trek or camping for one night in a nearby state park, "The Survival Handbook: Essential Skills for Outdoor Adventure" (DK, $30) will prepare and entertain you. Did you know that Land Rover suspension springs can be made into a machete or that, with a little practice, you can start a fire in a ... (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: John Pipkin reads from "Woodsburner" at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St. (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • A swing and a miss, and a home run

    Julianna Baggott is a heartbreaking writer, in part because she so nearly writes great books. Under the pen name N.E. Bode, she has published "The Anybodies," "The Somebodies," and "The Nobodies," popular books that similarly seem to miss perfection, not by a mile, but by a matter of feet. (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

    As major 20th-century American novelists go, Kurt Vonnegut did a remarkable job of keeping his private life out of his fiction. While the work of contemporaries such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth brims with characters and crisis cribbed, often defiantly, from their biographies, Vonnegut's only autobiographical novel, "Slaughterhouse Five," tells us more about an imaginary species of space aliens ... (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • 'Vanished Smile' and 'Crimes of Paris' examine the theft and return of painting of Mona Lisa

    On Aug. 21, 1911, a journeyman laborer named Vincenzo Peruggia surreptitiously unhooked Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" from the walls of the Louvre and headed off to a service stairwell. A former museum employee, Peruggia said he had hidden himself in a seldom-used broom closet the previous afternoon, waiting until Monday morning when the galleries were closed to the public ... (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • A visitor from the past unravels a family's fabric of lies

    In Mary McGarry Morris's new novel, "The Last Secret," a dysfunctional family collides with a psychopathic outsider, revealing the truth behind hidden misdeeds and the complexity of individual motive. This is not an unfamiliar theme for fans of Morris, author of "Songs in Ordinary Time" and "Vanished." (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • How globalization paves the way to poverty

    "Globalization is an international shakedown," Jon Jeter declares, "and its targets are ordinary people across the globe, men and women made sojourners in the country of their birth by global finance and its missionaries." In his new book, "Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People," Jeter presents lucid economic analysis and vivid portraits of the market's ... (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • A new crop of books in 'An Orchard Invisible,' 'Wicked Plants' and 'Summer World'

    When British soldiers arrived in Jamestown in 1676 to quell a Colonial rebellion, a few daring farmers slipped some jimson weed into the British chow. The soldiers hallucinated for 11 days. "One would blow up a feather in the air," writes a historian, "another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in ... (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • Short takes

    Imagine the suffering of African-Americans over centuries of slavery and racism, compounded by the slaughter, dispossession, and deracination of the American Indians, and you begin to grasp the enormity of the plight of Australia's Aborigines. (Boston Globe, 5/16/09)

  • When home is where the tent is

    What do summer camp, boot camp, Camp David, hobo camps, terrorist camps, and de facto camps for homeless people have in common? And what makes each distinct? Architecture professor Charlie Hailey pinpoints freedom and control as organizing principles in his freewheeling discussion about dozens of types of camps. The illustrated "Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space" (MIT, $29.95) is a ... (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • A young woman adrift, at the mercy of luck, love, and fate

    Rivers are major players in American mythology. Mississippi, Missouri, Hudson, Cuyahoga, Colorado, Rio Grande - their names invoke an endless cycle of discovery and diaspora, renewal and decay. "Follow Me," Joanna Scott's ambitious but disjointed new novel, sets a feckless young woman adrift on a fictional current, that of the Tuskee, and charts her adventures and mishaps as she attempts to escape the consequences of a disastrous adolescent encounter. (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • Love, American style

    Colm Tóibín, a writer of sophisticated elegances, takes a risk with his new novel "Brooklyn." (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • Bookings

    TOMORROW: Colm Tóibín reads from "Brooklyn," 7 p.m., Harvard Book Store. TUESDAY: Eva Hoffman reads from "Appassionata," 7 p.m., Harvard Book Store . . . Steve Kluger discusses "My Most Excellent Year," 7 p.m., Porter Square Books . (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • Books about growing your own food

    With the economy in the doldrums and first lady Michelle Obama having planted a vegetable garden at the White House, growing your own food is suddenly the thing to do. New books offer help to novices as well as experienced hands. (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • When secrets meet the light

    Two of these novels have a common theme, a parent's decision to shield a child from the truth. The third is an old-fashioned entertainment about a strange, gifted boy in the 19th-century Oxford of Charles Darwin and John Ruskin. (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • ''Armenian Golgatha'' provides an upclose account of genocide

    ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 By Grigoris Balakian Translated by Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag Knopf, 509 pp., illustrated, $35 (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • In ''Losing Mum and Pup,'' son offers fond, irreverent portrait of William F. and Patricia Buckley

    Oh boy, William F. Buckley Jr. must be rolling in his Sharon, Conn., grave. First, there's the annoyance that he's actually buried in a coffin, when his instructions were to have his ashes commingled with those of his wife, Patricia Taylor Buckley, in a sculptural bronze cross on his Stamford, Conn., lawn. (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • Short takes

    Dag, a corruption of dagger, is defined by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary as "a handgun or pistol, so called from serving the purposes of a dagger, being carried secretly and doing mischief suddenly." (Boston Globe, 5/10/09)

  • Beating the odds on the field - and off

    Grit, good coaching, flexible training methods, spectacular genes, however she's done it, Dara Torres is a wonder. Who else has won 12 medals over five nonconsecutive Olympics and beaten women half her age? No, make that women less than half her age. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Noir goes uptown

    Jimmy Luntz has got to be the first protagonist in noir history to begin his blood-soaked descent singing in a men's choir. Jimmy's pipes are only the first clue that "Nobody Move" isn't your run-of-the-mill, bullet-hole-jacketed crime novel. Instead, this fast, funny diversion is protean writer Denis Johnson's sly follow-up to his Vietnam epic "Tree of Smoke," winner of the 2007 National Book Award. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • A patchwork of life stories

    In the years since the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project got underway in 1994, it has examined 6,000 quilts preserved in museums and historical societies and treasured in private homes. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Reif Larsen, author of 'T.S. Spivet,' begins local book tour in Brookline

    Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, an endearing, insightful 12-year-old who makes maps of just about everything, hops a freight train in the illustrated debut novel "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet," being published Tuesday. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • 'Final Four of Everything' can settle - or start - disputes

    Greatest genius: Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson? Worst movie by a great director? Best sports year ever? Most iconic photograph? For "The Final Four of Everything" (Simon & Schuster), editors Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir enlisted experts on everything from Supreme Court decisions (the NYT's Adam Liptak) to fears and phobias (cartoonist Roz Chast) to choose winners in 150 debates ... (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Beyond words

    SOUTH SHORE WIDE: The Panoramas of A.P. Richmond By Arthur P. Richmond Schiffer, 157 pp., $39.99 This book celebrates the South Shore, depicting dramatic, wide-angle seascapes, scenic forests, and places rich in history like Quincy, where you'll find the Adams estate (above), home to Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Short takes

    AURA RIDER'S MASTERPIECE By Jane Hamilton Grand Central, 224 pp., $22.99 All that Laura Rider knows about books is what she hears on NPR while tending the plants at her garden center. Nevertheless, listening to her idol, Jenna Faroli, interview authors day after day is enough to inspire in Laura visions of herself as an author too, in "a long ... (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • An interview with Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo

    Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo gained international recognition with his 2005 novel "Pudor" ("Prudishness") and in 2006 became the youngest writer ever to win the Alfaguara Prize for his novel "Red April." In this superb novel of politics, terror, and human frailty, Felix Chacaltana, an assistant prosecutor, confronts a series of murders that may have roots in Peru's resurgent Maoist guerrilla ... (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • The rich are different: They're much brattier

    SPOILED By Caitlin Macy Random House, 220 pp., $24 The issue of privilege is periodically batted about in the class-conscious, literary world, and Caitlin Macy, author of a similarly themed novel, "The Fundamentals of Play," addresses it head-on by titling her story collection "Spoiled." While "privileged" and "spoiled" are not synonymous, they contain enough overlap to form a unifying thread ... (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Author readings, book signings in Greater Boston

    TOMORROW: Bernardo Atxaga ("The Accordionist's Son") and Ilan Stavans speak at 7 p.m., Boston University Phototonics Center . . . Laila Lalami reads from "Secret Son," 7 p.m., Harvard Book Store . . . Dr. David Kessler discusses "The End of Overeating," 7 p.m., Harvard Square Coop. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Carnal knowledge

    You know you want it - we all do, even though most have remained in the dark about what it actually is. Desire does make its demands, yet for all the staggering influence sexuality exerts on human history, we've more or less remained condemned to a misinformed sexual adolescence. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • Essays ask: Why must women be so hard on each other?

    Novelist Ayelet Waldman has degrees from Wesleyan University and Harvard Law School; a career that would-be writers would kill for; four "smart and thoughtful, funny and wise," "creative and very intelligent" children; and a handsome, brilliant, high-earning husband (Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon), who cooks, changes diapers, fixes leaky faucets, and is great in bed. You'd think she would be living happily ever after. (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • A classic, partly lost in time, mostly timeless

    Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," an occasion I celebrated in this space. This year is the 150th anniversary of its author's birth, and the celebration continues with the arrival of two new annotated editions of this wonderful novel. Just to set them briefly before you: "The Wind in ... (Boston Globe, 5/2/09)

  • This boy's life

    Colson Whitehead's new novel, "Sag Harbor," details the summer adventures of a group of teenage boys living in a black enclave of Long Island in 1985. (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • Born of the sins of the father, a corrupt South Africa

    Absolutist regimes corrupt even as they oppress; when liberation comes and the oppression is shattered, the corruption lives on. Indeed, it can mushroom under the new freedom, since the civic spirit, trampled for so long, hasn't had time to heal from cynicism and to take on its guardian role. (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • The gathering storm

    "Early Spring" is the kind of book we'll be seeing more of, as the natural world tilts, sags, slumps, and burns, growing ever-more heated, and with biology's whispered promises of impermanence dialed up to a such a volume now that even those who might not wish to consider such things can hear them roaring in the near distance. (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • 'A Terrible Splendor' recaps Don Budge's epic match against Gottfried von Cramm

    The Davis Cup match on July 20, 1937 was a contest of epic proportions. It was America against Germany, democracy against fascism. Millions around the world listened on the radio as Don Budge, a working-class player from Oakland, Calif., faced Gottfried von Cramm, an aristocrat under surveillance by the Gestapo. Von Cramm was a closeted homosexual who refused to join ... (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • Short takes

    THE BROTHER GARDENERS: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession By Andrea Wulf Knopf, 368 pp., $35 (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • Author appearances in the Boston area

    TODAY: Kathleen Kent ("The Heretic's Daughter") and Stacey D'Erasmo ("The Sky Below") read at 5 p.m., Newtonville Books . . . Jessica Handler discusses "Invisible Sister," 7 p.m., Harvard Square Coop. (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • Three score and 10 years ago, a concert emancipated a dream

    THE SOUND OF FREEDOM: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America By Raymond Arsenault Bloomsbury, 309 pp., illustrated, $25 (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • A colorful patchwork of Bay State history

    A lavishly produced and unorthodox history of Massachusetts has been pieced together from a mammoth labor of love. Fifteen years ago, volunteers fanned out looking for quilts made before 1950. "Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth" (University Press of New England), edited by Lynne Zacek Bassett, is an eye-popping tribute to the splendid variety among the 6,000 quilts found. The text ... (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • Reviews of crime novels 'Britten,' 'Execution Dock,' 'Wrongful Death'

    Graphic novels are starting to make their mark in crime fiction. Illustrated with rich, dark, broody ink and watercolor drawings in an oversize format, "Britten and Brülightly" by British author Hannah Berry is a slender tour de force. (Boston Globe, 4/26/09)

  • How Abe, Elvis, and other luminaries really got educated

    Teachers, please accept our sincerest apologies. For along with all the invaluable community building you do, for all the sore throats you've endured, and the mounds of paper you've corrected, sometimes it is only our rejection of you that can clear the path to greatness. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • A peep show of violence, self-contempt, and tender regret

    Mary Gaitskill's new collection of short stories, "Don't Cry," seems, in fact, to be three separate collections pursuing three philosophies about women, sexuality, and love in three different voices. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Seeing Thoreau in a new light: hard work and humor

    When I moved to New England in the early 1970s, I found that I had entered a world of counterculture bossiness. Outside work (at the now long-departed Schrafft's in the Prudential Center) most of the people I met managed to maintain self-congratulatory contempt for bourgeois values and buttoned-up lives, while at the same time laying down the most joyless laws ... (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • The world according to geeks

    "The Geeks' Guide to World Domination" (Three Rivers) is a fascinating and fun compendium of practical and esoteric lessons and pop-culture trivia. You can learn to program a remote control or to determine at which beaches you are most likely to be attacked by a shark. Author Garth Sundem lists 33 songs that can be played on the guitar with ... (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Folk music icon's protest anthems rang out a warning all over this land

    "Turn! Turn! Turn!" indeed. The past few years have been a time to celebrate Pete Seeger, the great American folk singer and social activist, who will turn 90 on May 3. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Short takes

    We pledge allegiance to the state of paranoid delusion, or at least we did until recently, when Donald Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" and "unknown knowns" were replaced by AIG and GM as the Creatures from the Black Lagoon of the American imaginary. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Mel's ode to the streets

    For Mel King, the community organizer whose failed 1983 campaign for mayor of Boston made history, everything comes back to the streets. That's where he knocked on doors, led protests, and celebrated the ties that bind neighbors to causes larger than themselves. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Short but not sweet

    There was a time not so long ago when writers could make a living crafting short stories. Those days are gone. Amid the downturn in publishing, the new mantra among literary agents and editors is: "How can we transform these stories into a novel?" (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Galgut expands on South Africa's ironies

    The character at the center of Damon Galgut's "The Impostor" would be equally at home in a Graham Greene novel. Adam Napier is a creatively stalled poet who moves to a ramshackle house in the barren Karoo region of South Africa to write again. Befriended by a crude developer who claims to be an old school friend and intrigued by ... (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Finding similarities, differences, and peace

    "Same Same," an inventive picture book concoction by Marthe Jocelyn with illustrations by Tom Slaughter, proves that the brilliance of concept books lies in ingenuity and simplicity. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • We're at the center of the universe - unless we're not

    We live on Earth, a clump of iron and magnesium and nickel, smeared with a thin layer of organic matter. It whirls along in a nearly circular orbit around a star we call the sun. The sun is made of hydrogen, a little bit of helium, and a few other things. It comprises 99.9 percent of all the mass in our solar system. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Melissa Stewart reads from "A Place for Birds," 3 p.m., Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St. . . . Lynne Griffin reads from "Life Without Summer," 2 p.m., Buttonwood Books, Route 3A, Cohasset. . . . Contributors to Salamander magazine read at 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St. (Boston Globe, 4/18/09)

  • Art for evolution's sake

    For those wary of biological explanations of human behavior, "The Art Instinct" makes for a refreshing read. A philosophy professor in New Zealand and the founder of the respected web site Arts & Letters Daily, Denis Dutton is no reductionist; his view of art would preserve all that is unique, challenging, and revelatory - in a word, human - about our creative and expressive activities. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Updike redux

    John Updike will always be best known for his novels and short stories. But the author, who died in January at 76, was a poet too. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Sometimes, it's hard to be a woman

    This month's Pop Lit lineup begins with an engaging oddity, an old-fashioned adventure story with a feminist twist. The second is a sharply funny comedy of manners set in contemporary Manhattan. The third is a thoughtful, well-written story about a young woman prevailing over a difficult past. The last is a sweeping fantasy about the mysterious outlaw Etta Place of Hole-in-the-Wall gang fame. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Reading frenzy

    Billed as a "feeding frenzy for the brain," the MIT Press Bookstore's annual loading-dock sale will offer tons of scholarly volumes at deep discounts. Every book at next weekend's event will be $10 or less, according to store manager John Jenkins. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Reviews of 'The Day We Found the Universe,' 'The Act of Love' and 'Once the Shore'

    Of course, there was no single day, as this title suggests, nor any collective we. Instead, there were decades of observation, calculation, and interpretation (mostly from 1900 to 1930), and a group of odd and ambitious individuals. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Bookings

    MONDAY: Kevin Phillips discusses "Bad Money," at 7 p.m., Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. . . . Sports author Bill Littlefield speaks at 7 p.m., Peabody Institute Library, 82 Main St., Peabody; to register, call 978-531-0100, ext. 10. . . . Michael A. King discusses "The Heartbreak Years," 7:30 p.m., Dover Town Library. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Words made fresh

    Perhaps you're celebrating the Resurrection in church this morning. Or you may be catching "Meet the Press" and scoffing at those sitting in their pews. Either way, it's clear that the trial and crucifixion of the historical Jesus mark one of the pivotal moments in humanity's stay on the planet. Scholars - atheists and believers alike - doggedly hunt for what really happened during that last week in Jerusalem. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Illustrated atlas puts wide world of wildlife at your fingertips

    Television brings creatures from all over the world into our living rooms. "The Illustrated Atlas of Wildlife" (University of California) lets you hold a collection of 800 stunning images and a wealth of easily digestible facts in your hands. Who knew that it's only the three-banded armadillo - not its nine-banded brethren - that rolls itself into a ball to ... (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • In Faber's satire, ancient scrolls reveal another Gospel

    Michel Faber has devised some lovely notions for "The Fire Gospel," a kind of myth or allegory that starts with the discovery of nine biblical scrolls and goes on to satirize all manner of American ways. (Boston Globe, 4/11/09)

  • Adventures in Asia

    A century before the modern rise of scrapbooking, Isabella Stewart Gardner was an enthusiastic and artful practitioner. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Paris in Boston: Views of the City of Light from the City Upon a Hill

    By Jack Dzamba Jack Dzamba, 75 pp., $34.95 Paris, Hemingway wrote, is a "moveable feast" that stays with you no matter where you go. Photographer Jack Dzamba latched onto the idea and came to think of Boston in the same way. Suddenly, everywhere he looked, he saw intimations of Paris: the Cabot Building is reminiscent of Place des Voges, Genzyme ... (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Author Walter Mosley's latest sleuth embodies an America in search of redemption

    In one of his finest novels to date, "The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery," Walter Mosley introduces a jaded African-American private investigator who is trying "to go from crooked to only slightly bent." McGill's past, however, and Mosley's elegant plot deny the reluctant investigator a simple life. When a seemingly straightforward assignment takes him upstate and then uptown, ... (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Help for those not just expecting but anxious

    Expecting a bundle of joy or already cradling a newborn? Feeling a tad frazzled with the tangled demands of parenthood, career, and marriage? Here are four books that offer just the help - and sometimes the hilarity - that most new parents need. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • The disconnect

    As consumers, Americans seem to want two things out of life: insanely low prices and flawless, round-the-clock customer service. And it better not come from India. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • A mothers' son

    Southern gentlemen at one time knew better than to be artists. By becoming a novelist, William Faulkner crossed a cultural divide into what were considered feminine pursuits. He wrote his editor Malcolm Cowley in 1946 that " 'art' was really no manly business. It was the polite painting of china by gentlewomen." Faulkner, who went on to take the step, ... (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • For spring, sampling new things

    Springtime makes one think of new beginnings, and it made this audiophile think it was time for something new. So I pulled three authors whose new works were unknown to me from the shelves. Happily, each offers something interesting enough to warrant hearing more from them down the line. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • 'Extreme Ice Now' documents breathtaking glaciers and their troubling retreat

    Is seeing believing? The Extreme Ice Survey that measures melting glaciers is operating under that assumption. Over the past two years, 27 cameras in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and elsewhere have been taking images. Some glaciers - with sweeping curves and deep shades of blue - are absolutely gorgeous. Others in marked retreat expose unsightly swaths of rocky debris. National Geographic's ... (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: J. Robert Lennon ("Castle" and Bill Scheft ("Everything Hurts") read at 2 p.m., Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St. . . . Terry Golson reads from "Tillie Lays an Egg," 3 p.m., Book Ends, 559 Main St., Winchester. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • How parents have taken the fun out of games

    Rarely has a book left me feeling so conflicted. Part confession, part cautionary tale, Mark Hyman's little book carries a big message about the "hostile takeover" of youth sports by adults. "Until It Hurts" is a must read, but it's not an easy read. We're likely to see ourselves, but unlikely to like what we see. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Short reviews of 'One D.O.A., One on the Way,' 'Gypsy: The Art of the Tease,' and 'I Can See Clearly Now'

    Constructed of miniature, numbered packets of terse observations, darkly comic dialogues, lists dashed off in anger or despair, this novel by Mary Robison viscerally evokes the physical and emotional exhaustion of living in post-Katrina New Orleans, that erstwhile good-time city drowning in neglect. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • An accidental tourist

    After the tragic deaths of his beloved wife and troubled son in an automobile accident, 55-year-old professor Henry Dorn quits his job at a women's college, closes up his Elmira, N.Y., home, packs his bags, and sails for the Netherlands, ostensibly to investigate his family history, a trip he calls "foolhardy" although we're not sure why. We might surmise that ... (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Books explore major league baseball from top to bottom

    Despite all the abounding badness in baseball since the 1990s, my spirits still soar at the mere words "Opening Day." In Boston tomorrow is it, the day of the year most filled with hope, and here is a bouquet of books with which to celebrate. (Boston Globe, 4/4/09)

  • Short Takes: A memoir of pain

    It took me awhile to warm to this memoir of living with chronic, crippling pain. At first, despite many descriptions of searing, spiking, burning, crushing, numbing physical, emotional, and spiritual pain, I found myself distanced from this suffering woman. (Boston Globe, 3/29/09)

  • Above the manor's madness

    During his life, which ended in 1913, Karl Wittgenstein was called the Andrew Carnegie of Austria. Today he is chiefly remembered as a man who did not have time for his children. (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • Book review of 'The Little Sleep,' 'Revenge of the Spellmans,' 'Spade and Archer'

    A wealth of neurologically impaired detectives have found a happy home in crime fiction. We've had detectives with synesthesia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's syndrome, and now narcolepsy. PI Mark Genevich struggles to stay awake as he walks Southie's mean streets. This down-at-the-heels ex-military man doesn't drive because it would be too dangerous, but he chain-smokes and repeatedly comes close to incinerating himself. (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • Graphic works: Revelations of war

    War - in the world, this country, the culture, a person's head, the bedroom and on the street - is the focus of the graphic works arrayed here. (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • Baseball buffs can have a field day with 'Splitters, Squeezes, and Steals'

    The big new photo book " Splitters, Squeezes, and Steals: The Inside Story of Baseball's Greatest Techniques, Strategies, and Plays" (Black Dog & Leventhal) by Derek Gentile is a history and a how-it's-done guide to all kinds of pitches and tricks with enough "best of" lists to keep a fan happy until opening day. The baseball lore runs rich and ... (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Lisa Genova reads from "Still Alice," at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville . . . . Kate Millet and Catharine MacKinnon speak at 2 p.m., at Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow St., Cambridge. . . . Dennis McCullough discusses "My Mother, Your Mother," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • Shelf Life: Faces of Maine Street

    Maine photojournalist Patrisha McLean has a soft spot for creatures of habit. McLean, a resident of Camden, Maine, for 18 years, photographed 80 townsfolk for "Maine Street: Faces and Stories from a Small Town" (Down East). Among them are Sam Jones, a devoted member of the Elite Coffee Club that has met six mornings a week for 45 years, and ... (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • A scholar looks at the Constitution as philosophy

    Cass Sunstein is a law professor. He specializes in teaching about the Constitution and is highly regarded among his colleagues in academic circles. I begin with this bit of background because if you were to read his newest book without knowing that he is a constitutional scholar, that thought would not likely occur to you. (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • For Wells Tower, paper planes spiraling down

    Like paper airplanes loosed from a height, the lives in "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" mostly spiral and crash. The art, and in the best of them it is considerable, is in the float, the impromptu curvet, the exhilarating lift on the way down. (Boston Globe, 3/28/09)

  • What's mine should be yours

    Modern agriculture began around 400 years ago. Traditionally the land of England had been owned and farmed in common. Over several centuries, it was converted into private property owned by the aristocracy, in a process called "enclosure." Much misery resulted, as farmers were pushed off the land into factories or urban slums. But much progress also resulted, since the new ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Cool things come in small packages

    A hotel room in a concrete drainage pipe. A portable ski chalet. A house made out of a shipping container. Ruth Slavid, the author of "Micro: Very Small Buildings" (Laurence King), does not quantify what qualifies as "very small," but most of the structures in this whimsical collection from around the globe look about as big as a walk-in closet. ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Short takes

    In this distaff version of "The Man Who Came to Dinner," Australian novelist Helen Garner provides wry support for the cliché that no good deed goes unpunished, though she does it without stooping to cliché herself. (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • The role of the reviewer

    Just to clear my name: I was not offering any personal opinions on New Bedford in my March 8 review of "Down at the Docks" (as Jane E. Dee suggested in her letter on March 15) but instead simply contemplating the city as it was presented in Rory Nugent's book. That's how I see my role as a reviewer. But ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Shelf life

    Writers' riffs Writers living in the Doghouse at Bennington College gather almost nightly for jam sessions. The late Liam Rector, longtime director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, didn't play an instrument himself, but he loved to listen to his fellow writers: guitarists David Gates and Sven Birkerts, vocalist Rebecca Chace, bass player Lee Clay Johnson, and others. (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Suspicion, secrets mix in tepid tale of academia

    In "Security," Stephen Amidon's semi-thriller set in New England, the super-wealthy financial wizard who serves as villain gets his comeuppance. (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • MySpace odyssey

    For 50 years, geeks have ruled the technology industry. Now we're seeing the rise of a new techno-force: twerps. (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • An American original

    In the spring of 1988, the novelist Robert Coover, then teaching at Brown University, organized a conference entitled "Unspeakable Practices: A Three-Day Celebration of Iconoclastic American Fiction." At least in part, the celebration was to honor Coover's colleague John Hawkes, who was retiring, and the assembled participants included many of the writers who embodied American postmodernism: Donald Barthelme, William Gass, ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Drood the obscure, reimagined

    If death had not intervened, the concluding installment of Charles Dickens's last novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," would have appeared 138 years ago this month; instead, it was cut short at six of the intended 12 numbers. Still, those unrealized pages have been exceptionally fruitful, spawning an entire field of literature, an enduring debate, and any amount of theatrical ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Politics and humanitarianism

    Mahmood Mamdani, a third-generation East African of Indian descent, grew up in Uganda, studied at Harvard, taught at various African and American universities, and is currently Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. A political scientist and anthropologist, he is best known for "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" and "When Victims Become Killers." His latest book, "Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Grub Street instructors Sonya Larson, James Scott, and others read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Hingham Public Library, 66 Leavitt St., Hingham, presents "Writing Massachusetts," featuring author talks and book signings, from 1 to 5 p.m. . . . Children's author Erica Perl reads from "Chicken Butt!," at 2 p.m., at ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Girls, interrupted

    With the insight of a novelist and the language of a poet, Jane Alison, author of "The Love-Artist," "The Marriage of the Sea," and "Natives and Exotics," begins her memoir, "The Sisters Antipodes," with the kind of shockeroo statement guaranteed to win the best-first-sentence award: "In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and ... (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Under the sea, among the blossoms

    The approach of spring makes one look more closely at the budding world. So for March, some new books for young readers that encourage us to do just that. (Boston Globe, 3/21/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Sam Allis and Bella English discuss "Last Lion," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Ulrich Boser discusses "The Gardner Heist," at 2 p.m., at Wellesley Booksmith, 82 Central St., Wellesley. . . . Brian Evenson and Alan Lightman read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • In a tumultuous China, days of rage

    The breakup of an ice shelf is a dangerous thing: The result is not a warming and moderating sea but tidal surges and the drifting crunch of icebergs. The death of Mao Zedong, China's own vast polar cap, produced no immediate thaw but spasms of repression, instead, against early whispers of change. (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • Hard knocks on New Bedford

    There seems to be a journalistic formula for writing about New Bedford. Writer Jason Warshof nails it in the first sentence of his review of Rory Nugent's "Down at the Docks" ("On the Waterfront," March 8). New Bedford, Warshof says, is "today a virtual case study in urban decline." (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • Simplicity plus ingenuity

    After what felt like a long, weary dry spell, picture books have leapt back into their own. Inventive, bold, subtle, this crop of picture books offers variety and charm for the very young. (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • Midwives to modernity

    On Feb. 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born, the American in a log cabin in Kentucky, the Englishman on a country estate. A birth date, Newsweek magazine declared last summer, was only one of many things they shared. Besides having the same astrological chart, the two great men, who never met, suffered from depression and wrestled with ... (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • All she wrote

    More than 30 years ago, Elaine Showalter's "A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing" helped launch American feminist criticism. Trading on Virginia Woolf's famous prescription for women writers - their need for "a room of one's own" - "A Literature of Their Own" argued that women writers as a group had passed through three distinct ... (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • Raising hell

    This immense novel, first published in France in 2006, has ignited fierce debates wherever it has appeared (including Germany and Israel), and the United States should prove no exception. You may close "The Kindly Ones" in revulsion after the first 100 pages or refuse even to open it once you know what it's about. Or, if you're like me, you ... (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • Great expectations

    Novelist Matthew Pearl, who lives in Cambridge, has made a career out of asking "What if?" about the lives of literary luminaries. His strategy has resonated with readers around the world. Pearl's first two historical thrillers, "The Dante Club" and "The Poe Shadow," have been translated into more than 30 languages. This week marks the publication of his third novel, ... (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • Short takes

    Ruth, the wife at the center of this sharp and funny academic novel, is a once-celebrated novelist, briefly contented mother, formerly hopeful hostess and guest. Now she is "left to chew the bitter cud of envy and resentment." She has become dowdy, disappointed, and frequently drunk. (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • The golden years, abroad

    Ever dreamed that you could live like an aristocrat if you moved to another country when you retire? In "Retirement Without Borders" (Scribner) expatriates Barry and Thia Golson suggest a reality check, hoping to keep others from making the same mistakes they have. Their book offers nuts-and-bolts advice on health care, real estate, taxes, and immigration. Dozens of expats discuss ... (Boston Globe, 3/14/09)

  • 'Believers' targets an unruly family

    "The Believers," Zoë Heller's third novel, is an exploration of what happens when the beliefs of a family dissolve. What's left of your morality, your very self? (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Murder, horror, in compact form

    Short stories are the audiophile's best friend. Easily digested during the course of a brief errand, they ask little in the way of commitment but deliver a lot. (Boston Globe, 3/7/09)

  • Freedom from and for

    "Some of the ideas emanating from the rive droite may be far-fetched. Still more may be shop-soiled," the British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge acknowledged in 2004. But in generating practical policies, "the Right clearly has more intellectual vitality than the Left." (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Not your average Cinderella story

    Fairies and angels, self-delusion, and starting over figure, separately, in this month's "Pop Lit" choices (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Short takes

    "Sonata for Miriam", "Show of Hands", and "Home Schooling." (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • The story as 'a mirage in the distance'

    The eight stories in Carol Windley's new collection, "Home Schooling' ' (Atlantic Monthly, $22), may be confined to Vancouver Island, Canada, but the depth and breadth of human experience that they contain are universal and timeless. A daughter attends her mother's wedding; a child discovers a neighbor's secret; a man, outwardly happy yet bereft, wanders into the forest. With consummate ... (Boston Globe, 3/7/09)

  • The wrestler

    When John Cheever, mortally ill, received the National Medal for Literature in 1982, William Styron called his position in literary history "immovably fixed as one of those huge granite outcroppings which loom over the green lawns and sunlit terraces in the land of his own magic devising." (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Mob mentality

    In "The Godfather," Mafia don Vito Corleone is shot down on the street by rivals, taken by surprise in a world where the rules have changed and a new course must be charted. Corleone's circumstances mirror the state of our nation and hold lessons for its future, according to the two international-relations experts who wrote "The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign ... (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Shelf life

    Honor roll Michael Dahlie, author of "A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living" (Norton), has won the 2009 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction. Dahlie's novel, about the travails of Manhattanite Arthur Camden, a fly fisherman and loving husband and father, has been praised for its sense of humor and humanity. (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Hefty servings of Irish cliches

    Two things spring immediately to mind when people think of Ireland: potatoes and drink. It doesn't seem to matter that the country of my forebears (the few who weren't German) is a globalized, high-tech state that manufactures Dell computers and Viagra and has salmonella outbreaks and a collapsing economy just like our own; Ireland's image remains tied to potatoes and ... (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • On the waterfront

    The promise of New Bedford, today a virtual case study in urban decline, still burned long after the last whaling ship set sail around the turn of the 20th century. (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Sue Miller reads at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. TOMORROW: Matt McCarthy discusses "Odd Man Out," at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • Beyond Words

    Ted Kennedy: Scenes From an Epic Life By Award-Winning Photographers and Writers of The Boston Globe Simon & Schuster, 198 pp., $28 (Boston Globe, 3/6/09)

  • In these clashes, moderation takes a beating

    There are some things you can't do when you are engaged in a sanctioned mixed-martial-arts fight. (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poets Christine Casson, Wendy Mnookin, and others read at 2 p.m., at Forsyth Chapel, Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Ave., Jamaica Plain. (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • Short takes

    António Lobo Antunes, one of Portugal's most esteemed novelists, for many years published short pieces of memoir, reflection, and fiction in weekly or biweekly columns in Portuguese newspapers. Collected here are a selection of autobiographical pieces that focus on his pampered childhood and fictions that focus on a variety of dismal or damaged lives. (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • George Washington posed here

    George Washington hated posing. A practical man little given to indulgence, he would have preferred riding out to inspect his vast farmland at Mount Vernon, in Virginia, or conducting business or legislative work, or just about anything else, for that matter, than to strike a pose for a painter. (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • ABCs for CEOs (and everyone else)

    Ken Watanabe, formerly a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., wrote "Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People" to teach decision-making skills to Japanese schoolchildren. He kept it light with quirky drawings and entertaining case studies about the Mushroom Lovers rock band and Kiwi the soccer star. Then a funny thing happened. In 2007, it became the biggest-selling ... (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • Where everybody knows your EKG

    The title of Irish writer Maeve Binchy's 15th novel, "Heart and Soul," couldn't be more apt. If Binchy were any more heartwarming, you'd need ice packs. She's like a hot flash for the soul. (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • The habit of seeing

    In 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O'Connor died from complications of lupus. She had lived with this autoimmune disease for 14 years, primarily confined to her mother's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga. At the time of her death, O'Connor had published only three books: the brief novels "Wise Blood" (1952) and "The Violent Bear It Away" (1960), and ... (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • Shocks to the system

    A couple of weeks ago, President Obama committed nearly $1 trillion to pull the US economy from its downward spiral, signing a nearly $800 billion stimulus plan, then pledging up to $275 billion to support the housing market. (Globe Staff, 2/28/09)

  • Rewarding recitals

    Years ago, before rote learning fell out of favor, schoolchildren were required to memorize and recite poems. Now the oral tradition is being revived with a national poetry slam that carries a $20,000 prize. (Boston Globe, 2/28/09)

  • From the everyday to infinity

    The American Library Association recently announced its big winners. Neil Gaiman (author of "Coraline" and "Stardust") won this year's Newbery Medal for his novel "The Graveyard Book." (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Bookings

    TUESDAY: Dave Zeltserman reads from "Small Crimes," at 7:30 p.m., at Back Pages Books. . . . Jonah Lehrer discusses "How We Decide," at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. . . . Jean Mason discusses "Intimate Tyranny," at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Boooks. (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Say what you mean, and say it mean

    David Denby's film reviews in The New Yorker are notable for their acumen and wide-ranging familiarity with literature as well as the movies; also for their good manners, even when the object is unworthy of praise. (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Up from tragedy

    An emergency call from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port last May planted the seeds for this biography. Following US Senator Ted Kennedy's seizure, the diagnosis was grim; a malignant mass was found in his left parietal lobe, indicating an aggressive cancer. (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Shelf life

    To catch a thief Journalist Ulrich Boser was determined to solve the Gardner art heist. He possessed a distinct advantage over others who had tried and failed, having inherited the case files of Harold Smith, one of the world's leading art detectives. Before Smith died, in 2005, he thought he was close to cracking the Gardner case. (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Far-sighted

    To understand what drives Paul Theroux, novelist and dean of American travel writers, consider this: He once decided to walk out the front door of his Medford home, climb on an MBTA train pointed south, and keep riding the rails until they ended at the bottom of South America. The result was "The Old Patagonian Express." (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Short takes

    LAST OF THE OLD GUARD By Louis Auchincloss Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pp., $25 Louis Auchincloss published his first novel in 1947. Many dozens of titles later, he is still turning out well-made fiction centered on manners, mores, and milieus that would have felt more familiar to Edith Wharton than to the book-reading public of today. (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • New & Recommended

    Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals By Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson Revelations big and small about the animal kingdom (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • What you don't know can be painful

    The most extraordinary thing about the secret at the heart of Hugo Hamilton's novel "Disguise" (Harper, $23.99) is - dare I say it? - that it might not even be true, and its not being true, if true, is never resolved, though in a most deft and gratifying way. Hamilton is the author of, among other works, two memoirs, the ... (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • The warp and woof of murder

    Cape Cod author Spencer Quinn's "Dog on It" has an animal detective - a very funny dog named Chet - who sniffs out clues and narrates from a distinctly canine perspective. Nuance he doesn't get. Humor he does. (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Attuned to the voices of New Bedford

    Rory Nugent's great "Search for the Pink-Headed Duck" took him to India; "Drums Along the Congo" took him to Africa. Now "Down at the Docks" (Pantheon, $24.95) takes Nugent to New Bedford, where he lived for 17 years and which he vividly captures by allowing fishermen and other dock denizens to tell their own stories. It is, however, Nugent's acute ... (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • What's up, 'Duck'?

    "Duck" (Reaktion, $19.95) is a lavishly illustrated and oddly fascinating book about the bird's role in human history, language, and culture. Using a light touch, author Victoria de Rijke, director of www.quack-project.com, conducts a sweeping survey of the subject, touching on creation myths, slang, Donald Duck, and the duck-speak of George Orwell's "1984" as well as the works of philosopher ... (Boston Globe, 2/21/09)

  • Creature features

    Dogs are so tuned in to us that they are the only animals who can follow our gaze to find food. Black cats are friendlier than other cats (studies have shown a correlation between fur color and behavior). Riding a horse may be 20 times more dangerous than riding a motorcycle. Yelling at cows scares them in a way that ... (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • A devotion to democracy

    After a long, sometimes bitter, grueling presidential campaign that allowed Americans for more than a year to examine the tension between politicians who offer hope and politicians who offer experience, what the country is craving right now is . . . an 888-page book about an American president who combined hope and experience. (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Mary Pat Kelly discusses "Galway Bay," at 2 p.m., at the Boston Public Library, Copley Square. (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • Short takes

    "When someone does a mad thing they leave you trying to explain it." David Thomson's father moved out on his mother and him when he was a small child, but continued to make established weekly visits. Though he obviously had another family elsewhere, he refused to acknowledge or explain it - ever. Thomson puzzled over his father's character and behavior, ... (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • Passing bills

    Robert G. Kaiser's new book could not be timelier. President Obama wants to change the way business is conducted in Washington. Kaiser's "So Damn Much Money" provides a history of the ways and means of business in the nation's capital over the past three decades. It is not pretty, and to say it needs fixing is an understatement. (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • A paean to war's quiet actors

    If you are a homeopathic type of reader who believes in treating like with like, then what better physic for these murky times than a novel that takes place almost entirely in the dark. In the terrifying dark of Nov. 14, 1940, to be precise, when Luftwaffe bombers destroyed the English Midlands city of Coventry. In one of the heaviest ... (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • Greene's letters slowly get to the heart of the matter

    "Ways of Escape" was the title of a collection of autobiographical fragments by Graham Greene. It served as an escape from many things - among them, from writing a full autobiography, though he did pen, at a safe 30-years' distance, a youthful memoir. (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • The find

    For a pick-me-up in trying times, check out the new book "11,002 Things to Be Miserable About," by Lia Romeo and her brother Nick Romeo (Abrams, $10.95). This parody of "14,000 Things to Be Happy About" targets the isms (racism, sexism, etc.) and absurdities of life, with silly, sad, serious, gross, and wacky entries. What's to be miserable about? Plus-size ... (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • Shelf life

    Knight moves A bagpiper playing outside a Cambridge bookstore on Saturday will herald the launch of a historical fantasy novel set in medieval Europe. In "The Book of Tormod: A Templar's Apprentice" (Scholastic), a clairvoyant Scottish boy struggles to harness his extraordinary powers. (Boston Globe, 2/14/09)

  • Songs of myself, on and on

    Before we begin, let's clarify matters: It's pronounced car-OH-kay, not carrie-OH-key. Not that anyone particularly cares. Most Americans, unless they are proficient in Japanese, or are sticklers for cross-cultural understanding, will go on pronouncing the word "karaoke" incorrectly forever. (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • An ancient lust and its echoes

    Between 1699 and 1725, at least 2,500 tons of ivory - over a quarter of a million elephant tusks - were shipped out of West Africa by Dutch and English traders. Between 1850 and 1910, Britain imported approximately 500 tons of ivory. Today, ivory poaching thrives while government-held stocks of ivory multiply. In his lively and erudite new book, "Ivory's ... (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Short Takes

    Moments of Clarity Born and raised at the intersection of Camelot and Hollywood, Christopher Lawford, like many a golden boy before him, did his best to turn that gold into dross. In "Symptoms of Withdrawal" he chronicled his addiction to drink and drugs. His object in "Moments of Clarity" is to illuminate the climb out of the pit of addiction, ... (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Obama in brief

    It's difficult to find marks of distinction among the boatload of new books about President Obama. One offbeat introduction is the size of an iPod on steroids. Oxford University Press is publishing "Barack Obama: A Pocket Biography of Our 44th President" ($3.95), by Harvard's Steven J. Niven, on Thursday, which the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, Obama's idol. By using tiny ... (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Out of tune with the world

    The first of these novels is a precisely observed story about a 40-year-old woman facing her own failures and limitations. The second is an unusually good, and unusual, coming-of-age story. The third, by an extremely popular writer of women's fiction, may be her best work to date. (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Shelf life

    Blue lines "Six Writers in Search of a Little Action" at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education is being advertised as an evening of humorous readings on love, sex, and rejection. Charles Coe, a never-been-married middle-aged man, and Elizabeth Searle, founder of PEN New England's series of erotic readings, are among those who will be making their confessions beginning at ... (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • The brides of Frank

    All right, I'm going to say it. I wouldn't live in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for all the tea in China. I'm sorry, but not a single Wright dwelling looks even remotely comfortable to me. (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Beyond Words

    The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole Photographs by Stuart D. Klipper (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • A New England life, outlined in poignancy, precision

    The odds are that most of us will die slowly. No sudden heart attack, no plane augering into a cornfield a few miles shy of a runway. We will die in a bed in a hospital, hospice, or at home. Death is, of course, right up there with those verities we group with taxes and the Yankees spending indecent amounts ... (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Screen grabs

    The handsome two-story house stood "at 801 Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, complete with a clay tennis court that ran parallel to the swimming pool." Its five bedrooms could have comfortably housed Joseph P. Kennedy's growing young family in 1928. Would history have been different had the Kennedy dynasty landed on the Left Coast? (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • The omnivores remember

    This is the anniversary of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, and in keeping with the day's Caledonian spirit, it is the traditional beginning of the marmalade-making season here in my kitchen. Proper Seville oranges having been secured, the process begins with revisiting stuck-together records of marmalades past, then to books, sometimes the Web, but inevitably to squandered hours ... (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Neverlands made real

    We all have a stack of audiobooks (and books) collected over the years that taunt us from the shelves, knowing we don't have time for them. Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the new audiobooks vying for attention, I decided to adhere to at least one New Year's resolution and clear my shelves of some titles. (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Geraldine Brooks reads from "People of the Book," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Children's author Mitali Perkins speaks at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 2/7/09)

  • Echoes of Shakespeare, circuitously assessed

    "Shakespeare makes modern culture," Marjorie Garber writes, "and modern culture makes Shakespeare." The idea is familiar, even obvious - Avon's swan has glided into every age, and every age has made a particular use of him - but it is elegantly put. But then Garber stops to explain that her particular pretzel-shaped elegance is a chiasmus - the inversion of ... (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Stealing home

    Twelve years ago Susette Kelo, an EMT who raised five sons, bought her first house. She loved her little pink cottage and its view of the Thames River in New London, Conn. (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Young-adult novels in New England

    1. "Eclipse," by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown, hardcover) 2. "New Moon," by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown, paperback) (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Be my Valentine (with some practice)

    When it comes to finding and keeping true love, a lot of lonely hearts I know would willingly cast spells or light candles if they thought it would work. So what better time than a Valentine's Day month to look at a collection of books that promises clear directions on finding, keeping, and improving love? (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Rough magic

    Reviewing a collection of essays by Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike called him "the only writer . . . whose books, considered as a whole, give the happy impression of an oeuvre, of a continuous task carried forward variously, of a solid personality, of a plenitude of gifts exploited knowingly." Never have words of praise for another writer been more fittingly ... (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Yesterday and tomorrow

    As I began Henry Alford's "How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People," I thought I knew what I was reading. After laying out his thesis that the elderly will prove fonts of wisdom, Alford writes, "And so I have decided to interview and spend time with as many fascinating senior citizens as I can." Ah, I thought, ... (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Short takes

    Grégoire Bouillier's "Report on Myself" is hardly clinical. On the contrary, the memoir is an idiosyncratic exploration of how early experiences, transformed into emblems, decided the shape of his life. An almost fatal childhood virus (Staphylococcus aureus) becomes death, a glimpse of female nudity (Madame Fenwick at the bidet) becomes lust and longing. Bouillier's loves and losses fall into familiar ... (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Sensibility under construction

    In 1948, at the age of 15, Susan Sontag writes in her journal, "Can I never escape this interminable mourning for myself?" The question hovers over "Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963" as it records the development of a young intellectual consciousness in all its aching precocity. This question also indicates the inwardness of Sontag's passions, her self-lacerating submission to a ... (Boston Globe, 1/31/09)

  • Shelf life

    Living small In 1972, environmentalist Donella H. Meadows was the lead author of the international bestseller "The Limits to Growth," one of the first books to sound an alarm over the risks posed by global population growth. A professor at Dartmouth College, Meadows practiced what she preached. She was a founder and resident of Cobb Hill, a co-housing community in ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • A tale of power and ethics, skillfully told

    "Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting." So claims the narrator of Barry Unsworth's 1995 novel, "Morality Play." (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • Book review: Memorable new works on Lincoln

    For many Americans, it is always Lincoln time. President Obama is among them. He's an Illinois lawyer who first entered the national limelight as an orator, like Lincoln. In his first and only term on Capitol Hill he denounced a dubious but popular war, like Lincoln. He announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill., quoting Lincoln on the need to ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • Short takes

    Inside each of us allegedly lurks a book, and inside old newshounds it's generally pulp fiction. In this convoluted thriller by retired Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., a journalistic investigation exposes a brazen Beltway conspiracy of intimidation and extortion involving the outsourcing of covert operations, a scandal whose spreading stain reaches Congress, the Pentagon, even the Oval Office itself. ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • Romance novels in New England

    1. "Star Bright," by Catherine Anderson ( Signet , paperback) 2. "Fire and Ice," by Julie Garwood (Ballantine, hardcover) (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • A son caught in the emotional crossfire of a literary pair

    Literary critic Edmund Wilson lived in Wellfleet for much of his life, yet wrote little about Cape Cod. Curiously, major writers who have lived in this region have tended to overlook the place. John Dos Passos said nothing of it. Same with Conrad Aiken. "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was Norman Mailer's only book set on the Cape, and he lived ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • Erdich's unleashes her magic once again in collection of short stories

    It's 1932, and a homeless young widow brings her three children to the fair, where they line up to see the Great Omar, "Aeronaut Extraordinaire." When the barnstormer asks if anyone wants to go up in the biplane, the mother suddenly elbows through the crowd and, "without a backward look," climbs aboard, her 11-year-old daughter, Mary, watching helplessly as Omar ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • In praise of the cold, the wet, the white

    January often feels like the black hole of winter, and lest we fall through it entirely, we have two new beautiful picture books to remind us that the season, even at its coldest and bleakest, has its bright side. I read both in the midst of an ice storm, the perfect time to curl up with a book like Cynthia ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • First, do no harm - and then kill

    A pigeon and a rat fight in the snow on a sidewalk in Manhattan, and Dr. Peter Brown pauses to watch. His mugger soon discovers that he's made a spectacularly bad choice for a victim. Dr. Brown (né Pietro Brnwa and also known as Bearclaw) is a former mafia hit man with built-in instincts he can barely control. When Brown ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • Stationary pursuits

    All around me, people, some of them actual friends of mine, are making plans to fly off to sunny climes for winter vacations. I can't imagine anything more horrible - air travel, unstructured days, soul-destroying hours waiting for companions to get ready to set off on pointless excursions. Add to that thoughts about pipes freezing back home and the neighbors ... (Boston Globe, 1/25/09)

  • Shelf Life

    A loss in Lexington Last summer Sundial Bookstore in Lexington Center closed when its owners retired. Now emotions are running high over the closing on Saturday of Waldenbooks, the last bookstore in downtown Lexington. (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Perpetual nation

    Anyone who has a job, a mate, and a self, not to mention children, is a juggler. Must I attend the next professional conference? Dare I skip my kid's next soccer game? (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • A gift from a godmother of jazz

    If jazz were Oz, Pannonica de Koenigswarter (1913-88) would be its Glinda the Good. She was the Jazz Baroness, a Rothschild heiress who was drawn to America after World War II by her love of the music. (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • New & Recommended

    Postcards From Tomorrow Square: Reports From China By James Fallows Dispatches from a veteran journalist that enlighten and occasionally alarm (Vintage, $14.95). (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Bookings

    WEDNESDAY: Anita Silvey reads from "I'll Pass for Your Comrade," at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. . . . John Summers ("Every Fury on Earth") and George Scialabba ("What Are Intellectuals Good For?") speak at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline. . . . Nami Mun reads from "Miles From Nowhere,"at 7 p.m., ... (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • The top 5 Memoirs/ Diaries in New England

    1. "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia," by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin, paperback) (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Evolutionary road

    February 12 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, so brace yourself for an avalanche of all things Darwin: lectures, bumper stickers, DVDs, baby outfits. (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Lingering wounds

    On April 6, 1968, in the nation's capital, a man named Oscar King shot at passing cars during the violence that broke out all over America after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Short takes

    Diana Athill's memoir, written in her 89th year, tackles the little-documented subject of "falling away." (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Chagall, chronicler of a century's triumphs, terrors

    CHAGALL: A Biography By Jackie Wullschlager Knopf, 582 pp., illustrated, $40 Marc Chagall, who died in 1985 at age 97, is best remembered for his vivid colors, his villagers and animals floating through the air untethered to the homely realities of his native town in the Russian Jewish Pale, but above all, perhaps, for his fiddler on the roof ("The ... (Boston Globe, 1/18/09)

  • Books that leave their mark

    Michael Connelly author of "The Brass Verdict" "Michael Koryta's new book Envy the Night is a tour de force of character, dialogue, and deep, dark plotting. This is a young author who writes well beyond his years, and this is his best yet." (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Labors of love, and a Lab

    NOSE DOWN, EYES UP By Merrill Markoe Villard, 305 pp., $24 SING THEM HOME By Stephanie Kallos Atlantic Monthly, 542 pp., $25 THE VIRGIN QUEEN’S DAUGHTER By Ella March Chase Crown, 368 pp., $24.95 The first of these novels is a delightful dog-centered entertainment. The second is a big, emotionally generous story about a family haunted by a peculiar tragedy. ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Empire vs. ideals

    "There are no longer permanent principles, only permanent interests, and we pursue these to the exclusion of all else." This declaration by Lord Palmerston, Britain's 19th-century foreign secretary, is aptly quoted in "Land of Marvels" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26), Barry Unsworth's superb novel of imperial folly and personal tragedy. Set in Mesopotamia in 1914 on a site being excavated by ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Back to capitalism

    INVISIBLE HANDS: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan By Kim Phillips-Fein Norton, 356 pp., illustrated, $26.95 People who read books about obscure aspects of political history, and especially those who spend their time reading newspaper reviews of such books, are clearly not cut from the common cloth. One might suppose, then, that you who ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Ted Sorensen ("Counselor") and Ted Widmer ("The Ark of Liberties") speak at 2 p.m., at the JFK Library, Columbia Point; for more information, call 617-514-1643 or visit www.jfklibrary.org. . . . Hallie Ephron discusses "Never Tell a Lie," at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Jami Brandli and Tony Eprile read at 6:30 ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Short Takes

    WISHFUL DRINKING By Carrie Fisher Simon & Schuster, 163 pp., $21 While there will always be one small corner of movieland - or a great big back lot - where Carrie Fisher remains the teenage space princess with the headphone hairdo, the real Carrie Fisher confesses ruefully to having reached the age of 52 , which means that she is ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • New & Recommended

    The First Person and Other Stories By Ali Smith A remarkable collection of resolutely unsentimental and unresolved stories (Pantheon, $23.95). (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Evermore

    Born 200 years ago on Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe, like his raven, his most famous character, hovers over American culture: brooding, scowling, and winking. Poe is arguably the most influential of our great writers, but that never stopped highbrow authors from condescending to him. Emerson called Poe the "jingle man." Eliot said he had a prepubescent ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Most definitely misbehaving

    Less than two weeks into the new year's regime of clean living and industry, some of us are already beginning to feel the call of the wild and to forget how tiresome revelry and dissipation really are. A most salutary reminder comes in the shape of D. J. Taylor's "Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age" (Farrar, ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • A juggernaut unleashed

    SERENA By Ron Rash Ecco, 371 pp., $24.95 A CHRISTMAS GRACE By Anne Perry Ballantine, 210 pp., $18 MY LIFE AT FIRST TRY By Mark Budman Counterpoint, 218 pp., $24 Economic depression, financial meltdown, political corruption, corporate greed, and criminality. History shows us that we have been here before and learned little. Historical fiction goes further, inviting us to observe ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Shelf Life

    Poe-pourri Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809, though his family soon moved on. In later years, Poe expressed disdain for Boston and its literary tradition. Putting all that aside, Boston College is celebrating the bicentennial of his birth. On Thursday, Matthew Pearl, author of "The Poe Shadow," a historical novel, and Poe scholar Scott Peebles ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • An intricately structured tale of absence and struggle

    LARK AND TERMITE By Jayne Anne Phillips Knopf, 254 pp., illustrated, $24 Secrets, and their rate of revelation, are among an author's most treasured tools, and while "Lark and Termite" contains enough mysteries to satisfy discriminating readers (Who is Lark's father? Is Nonie a murderer? Will Bobby survive a massacre in Korea?), Jayne Anne Phillips unspools them leisurely, allowing for ... (Boston Globe, 1/11/09)

  • Hocus bogus

    FAKERS: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders By Paul Maliszewski New Press, 245 pp., $24.95 Effective fabulists - be they satirists, conmen, or merely gifted barroom liars - succeed by being able to predict the content of their mark's imagination. As artists of human expectation they provoke a dream or fear lurking in the mind, beyond doubt, and ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • A ghost of football past

    THE GALLOPING GHOST: Red Grange, an American Football Legend By Gary Andrew Poole Houghton Mifflin, 336 pp., illustrated, $25 THE FIRST TIP-OFF: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA By Charley Rosen McGraw-Hill, 288 pp.,illustrated, $24.95 FOLLOW THE ROAR: Tailing Tiger for All 604 Holes of His Most Spectacular Season By Bob Smiley Harper, 280 pp., illustrated, $25.95 ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Short takes

    BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age By D. J. Taylor Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 361 pp., illustrated, $27 The "Bright Young People" flourished in the 1920s and are remembered for their extravagance, whimsicality, frivolity, and calculated excess. While many of them frittered away much of their time and talent, many others produced fine novels, essays, paintings, ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Shelf Life

    Flying the coop For 10 years, cookbook author Terry Golson has raised chickens in her backyard. She enjoys their distinct personalities as much as she likes the eggs they produce. Now they have a starring role in her first children's book, "Tillie Lays an Egg" (Scholastic). (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Bookings

    WEDNESDAY: Chris Adrian ("Gob's Grief," "The Children's Hospital") reads at 6:15 at the Hotel Marlowe, 25 Edwin Land Blvd., Cambridge. . . . Benoit Denizet-Lewis discusses "America Anonymous," at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline. . . . Joan Anderson discusses "The Second Journey," at 7:30 p.m., at Dover Town Library, 56 Dedham St., Dover. . . . ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Inner visions

    THE FIRST PERSON AND OTHER STORIES By Ali Smith Pantheon, 206 pp., $23.95 Ali Smith's new collection is her ninth book in 13 years. Her previous books have been shortlisted for the most prestigious prizes awarded to British Commonwealth writers - the Man Booker, the Orange, the James Tait Black - and her novel "The Accidental" won the Whitbread Award. ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Free speech versus fear

    DEMOCRACY'S PRISONER: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent By Ernest Freeberg Harvard University, 380 pp., illustrated, $29.95 UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen By Christopher Capozzola Oxford University, 334 pp., illustrated, $34.95 Rarely do the principles of individual rights and liberties conflict more with the notion ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • New & Recommended

    Lulu in Marrakech By Diane Johnson In Johnson’s new novel, a naive undercover agent is beset by betrayals, duplicity, and plain old bad karma (Dutton, $25.95). Descartes’ Bones By Russell Shorto Through the lens of the philosopher’s grave-hopping remains, Shorto traces the shift from medieval thought to modernity (Doubleday, $26). Testimony By Anita Shreve A full, sensitive reckoning of a ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Friedman's guys, still lonely, still funny

    THREE BALCONIES: Stories and a Novella By Bruce Jay Friedman Biblioasis, 203 pp., $24.95 Bruce Jay Friedman's razor-sharp wit and keen observation of the genus American male (from the 1950s to the present) have the power to make men laugh and women weep. He has written highly acclaimed novels ("Stern," "A Mother's Kisses"), hilarious books of nonfiction ("The Lonely Guy," ... (Boston Globe, 1/4/09)

  • Contests and contentions

    A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES By Dave Zirin New Press, 302 pp., $26.95 There is much about the sports landscape that outrages Dave Zirin: the way "the Olympics became Cold War morality plays," for example, and how "sports [has] played a prominent role in hyping" hot wars as well, especially since 1991. (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • Catching up to the speed of life

    THE EXPERTS’ GUIDE TO DOING THINGS FASTER: 100 Ways to Make Life More Efficient Compiled by Samantha Ettus Clarkson Potter, 352 pp., $19.95 THINGS I WISH MY MOTHER HAD TOLD ME: A Guide to Living With Impeccable Grace and Style By Lucia van der Post Da Capo, 400 pp., $25 MAN VS. WEATHER: Be Your Own Weatherman By Dennis DiClaudio ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • Short Takes

    MRS. ASTOR REGRETS: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach By Meryl Gordon Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp., illustrated, $28 Evidently someone decided what we need in tough economic times is a stiff shot of schadenfreude. That might explain the decision to pull this journalistic loaf out of the oven before the legal melodrama it chronicles is fully baked. (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • On Crime

    BONE BY BONE By Carol O’Connell Putnam, 340 pp., $24.95 ECHOES FROM THE DEAD By Johan Theorin Translated, from the Swedish, by Marlaine Delargy Dell, 400 pp., paperback, $12 QUICK STUDY By Maggie Barbieri St. Martin’s Minotaur, 324 pp., $24.95 A man's need to unravel his brother's disappearance fuels Carol O'Connell's new stand-alone, "Bone by Bone." Oren Hobbs and his ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • In Johnson's 'Marrakech,' intrigue and bad karma

    LULU IN MARRAKECH By Diane Johnson Dutton, 307 pp., $25.95 "We had been taught that sometimes you must forget your personal history and come to live another," states the eponymous narrator of "Lulu in Marrakech," Diane Johnson's clever and bracingly astringent new novel. (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • Tragedy, loyalty on the bayou

    Jesmyn Ward grew up in De Lisle, Miss., not far from New Orleans, and her remarkable first novel, "Where the Line Bleeds"(Agate Bolden, $15), is a lyrical yet clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted. The story of twin brothers raised by their grandmother, the novel opens with the boys' high school graduation ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • A writer revived

    F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives, but he failed to note that the second act often comes after death, especially for American writers. Fitzgerald himself was a prime example; fallen out of fashion in his final years, pressed for cash and hacking in Hollywood, a decade after he died he was "revived" as a ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Local heroes "The Good Thief," by Hannah Tinti, is the year's best debut by a New England author. That's the consensus of 10 booksellers who responded to a call sent out by the New England Independent Booksellers Association. Tinti's designation as a New England author comes with an asterisk: She grew up in Salem but has lived in New York ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason By Russell Shorto Deftly weaving narrative details and analysis, this account traces the journey from medieval thought to modernity (Doubleday, $26). (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • Seeing things

    STEPPING STONES: Interviews With Seamus Heaney By Dennis O’Driscoll Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 522 pp., illustrated, $32 The novelist John McGahern, fellow rock-dweller on Ireland's literary Parnassus, remarked upon visiting Seamus Heaney's newly acquired house: "Well, you've bought the coffin." Seamus Deane - schoolmate, friend and another Parnassian - addressed a letter to the famous poet putting his name in ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • Bookings

    FRIDAY: James Boice, Daniel Trask, and Len Solo read at 8 p.m., at Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge. . . . Raffi Yessayan discusses "Eight in the Box," at 6 p.m., at Front Street Book Shop, 165 Front St., Scituate Harbor. (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • A Reading Life

    I'm sorry to say that I've pretty much abandoned the idea of one day finding a working amulet or a secret chamber or an entrance to another world. When I was young I spent a lot of time hunting for little doors, tapping on walls, and poking hedges looking for spots permeable to other dimensions. I believe I came close ... (Boston Globe, 12/28/08)

  • The view from Planet Avedon

    RICHARD AVEDON: Performance By John Lahr, Mike Nichols, André Gregory, Mitsuko Uchida, and Twyla Tharp Abrams, 303 pp., illustrated, $75 RICHARD AVEDON: Portraits of Power By Renata Adler, Paul Roth, and Frank Goodyear Steidl/Corcoran Gallery of Art, 295 pp., illustrated, $60 "Power" and "performance" have more in common than a first letter and Richard Avedon's avid interest. At their most ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Testimony By Anita Shreve A full, sensitive reckoning of a scandal and resulting tragedy at a New England prep school (Little, Brown, $25.99). Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill, 1875-1945 By Carlo D'Este An epic story, told with candor and clarity, about the greatest generalissimo of the 20th century (Harper, $39.95). 2666 By Roberto Bolano Composed of five stylistically varied ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Home truths Twenty-six-year-old Jenna Woginrich rents a cabin in Vermont, where she raises chicken and sheep, grows vegetables, and bakes bread. Though she works 9-to-5 as a web designer, she lives off the land as much as she can. (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • Getting a taste of the bull market

    BEEF: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World By Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser Morrow, 238 pp., $25.95 As an exercise in culinary history, this slender volume is hardly groundbreaking. We've already seen a smorgasbord of books that explore our past via a single foodstuff. As a cautionary tale against capitalist gluttony, Michael ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • Song and celebrations

    THE LUMP OF COAL Written by Lemony Snicket Illustrated by Brett Helquist HarperCollins, 40 pp., ages 4-8, $12.99 ONE HUNDRED SHINING CANDLES Written by Janet Lunn Illustrated by Lindsay Grater Tundra, 32 pp., ages 6-10, $17.95 AMANDINA By Sergio Ruzzier Roaring Brook, 32 pp., ages 4 and up, $16.95 NIGHT OF THE MOON: A Muslim Holiday Story Written by Hena ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • Short Takes

    THE URBAN HERMIT: A Memoir By Sam MacDonald St. Martin’s, 281 pp., $24.95 At Easter 2000, "a hundred and twenty pounds overweight and dead-ass broke," Sam MacDonald decided to get his life in order. Motivated primarily by debt, not fat, he embarked on the "Urban Hermit Financial Emergency Rotgut Poverty Plan," the main feature of which was an 800-calorie-a-day diet ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • Roller coaster

    PANIC: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity Edited by Michael Lewis Norton, 391 pp., $27.95 The publisher's publicity letter for Michael Lewis's new book is a classic come-on. Too bad it's more appealing than the book itself. The note from W. W. Norton begins, "Michael Lewis's much anticipated new book 'Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity' could not be ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • A fluid faith

    CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS: A Spiritual Confession By Anne Rice Knopf, 245 pp., $24 DESCARTES’ BONES: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason By Russell Shorto Doubleday, 299 pp., illustrated, $26 THE MIND THAT IS CATHOLIC: Philosophical and Political Essays By James V. Schall Catholic University of America,337 pp., $34.95 HOLY ROLLER: Growing Up in the Church ... (Boston Globe, 12/21/08)

  • From Shreve, school and scandal

    TESTIMONY By Anita Shreve Little, Brown, 307 pp., $25.99 Anita Shreve's "Testimony" is an aching study of "what ifs," of consequences for momentary failures of judgment. In this story about a sex scandal at an elite New England prep school, Shreve allows each character to reflect on his or her life before that night, an innocent time that calls forward ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Where the wild things were

    A PASSION FOR NATURE: The Life of John Muir By Donald Worster Oxford University, 535 pp., illustrated, $34.95 Think you know the real John Muir? Think again. (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Natural wonder

    FLIGHT: New and Selected Poems By Linda Bierds Putnam, 212 pp., $24.95 RED ROVER By Susan Stewart University of Chicago, 105 pp., $22 WHIRL IS KING: Poems From a Life List By Brendan Galvin Louisiana State University, 67 pp., $17.95 The late Stephen Jay Gould, valiantly attempting to broker a truce in the roiling Darwin wars, liked to speak of ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Nothing lets you down like excess

    THIS ONE IS MINE By Maria Semple Little, Brown, 289 pp., $24.99 SECOND TIME AROUND By Marcia Willett St. Martin’s, 304 pp., paperback,$13.95 THE SWEET IN-BETWEEN By Sheri Reynolds Shaye Areheart, 208 pp., $23 Maria Semple takes on the follies of the posh life in Los Angeles in her sharp, funny first novel. British author Marcia Willett demonstrates why her ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Sven Birkerts, Lisa Borders, and others read from the work of David Foster Wallace at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Jennifer Haigh discusses "The Condition," at 3 p.m., at Pratt Memorial Library, 35 Ripley Rd., Cohasset. . . . Mary Bevilacqua, Ann Flanigan, and Kristen Weiss sign "Cookie Exchange Favorites," from 1 ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Origin of specie

    THE ASCENT OF MONEY: A Financial History of the World By Niall Ferguson Penguin, 441 pp., illustrated, $29.95 Speaking at a conference of self-satisfied bankers in the Bahamas in November 2006, Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard University, was dismissed as an alarmist for suggesting that the good times would not last indefinitely. Alas, he was vindicated, and not ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Beyond Words

    Vanity Fair: The Portraits -- A Century of Iconic Images By Graydon Carter and the Editors of Vanity Fair Abrams, 383 pp., $65 Irving Berlin, Radiohead. Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush. Al Jolson, Tom Hanks. Colette, Susan Sontag. W. C. Fields, Whoopi Goldberg. Lionel, Ethel, John, and Drew Barrymore. Images of these and dozens of other famous figures in art, ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Rich fare for lean times

    Books, always excellent gifts in my view, seem especially fitting this year given that so many people will have plenty of time for reading in the months ahead, what with not having jobs and all. In that spirit, let us start with "Elizabeth David's Christmas" (edited by Jill Norman with a foreword by Alice Waters, Godine, $25.95), a collection of ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Cranking up classics, Christmas, kittens

    DEWEY:The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World By Vicki Myron with Bret Witter Hachette Audio, abridged nonfiction, four CDs, four hours and 30 minutes, $22.98, read by Suzanne Toren; also available as a download from www.audible.com, $18.19 HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS!: And Other Gifts From Dr. Seuss By Dr. Seuss Listening Library, unabridged fiction, two CDs, two hours, ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill, 1875-1945 By Carlo D'Este An epic story, told with candor and clarity, about the greatest generalissimo of the 20th century (Harper, $39.95). (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Short Takes

    ALEX AND ME By Irene M. Pepperberg Collins, 232 pp., $23.95 The last words Alex said to his longtime companion, Irene, before his unexpected death at age 31 were "You be good. I love you," an exchange no less touching for the fact that Alex was a parrot. And not just any parrot but the avian prodigy that Irene Pepperberg ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Shelf Life

    A 'Carol' echoes Charles Dickens was in desperate financial straits when he dashed off "A Christmas Carol" in the fall of 1843. His publisher rejected it, so he put out the book on his own. It was an immediate hit. That's how the story goes in Les Standiford's new book, "The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • The sputtering engine of capitalism

    In 1988, Michael Lewis left the trading floor of Salomon Brothers to become a writer. "Liar's Poker," his memoir of life in the "testosterone tank" of Wall Street, brilliantly conveyed the craziness of that world, and books like "Moneyball" and "The New New Thing" followed. As editor of "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity" (Norton, $27.95), Lewis selected over ... (Boston Globe, 12/14/08)

  • Short Takes

    WINNIE AND WOLF By A. N. Wilson Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 363 pp., $25 P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening By Studs Terkel New Press, 288 pp., paperback, $16.95 The Hitler we are introduced to in A. N. Wilson's oddly provocative novel is a "polite, charming, opera 'geek' who remembered the names of contraltos in long-gone provincial productions," ... (Boston Globe, 12/7/08)

  • Getting the goods - fiction

    The year brought new fiction from writers such as Philip Roth ("Indignation"), Marilynne Robinson ("Home"), Toni Morrison ("A Mercy"), and John Barth ("The Development"). But the novel that delighted me more than any "big book" was a sleeper, published not in 2008 but in 1924. "The Rector's Daughter," by F. M. Mayor, is a slim masterpiece whose first sentence - ... (Globe Correspondent, 12/5/08)

  • New & Recommended

    2666 By Roberto Bolaño Composed of five stylistically varied parts, Bolaño's final novel is powerful and complex (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30). (Boston Globe, 12/7/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Honors and editions As J.M.G. Le Clézio accepts the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm Wednesday, the writer, known as France's "nomad novelist," will attract a new audience. (Boston Globe, 12/7/08)

  • Making war

    WARLORD: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945 By Carlo D’Este Harper, 845 pp., illustrated, $39.95 (Boston Globe, 12/7/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Bill Brett signs "Boston," at 2 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline. . . . Allison Amend , Douglas Bauer , and Anne Landsman read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Gregory Maguire reads from "A Lion Among Men," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 12/7/08)

  • Short Takes

    VENICE FOR LOVERS By Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein Grove, 216 pp., $19.95 THE WRITER AS MIGRANT By Ha Jin University of Chicago, 96 pp., $14 GONE TOMORROW By P. F. Kluge Overlook, 286 pp., $25.95 Any visit to Venice is a gift, even a visit by proxy, offered here by novelist Louis Begley and historian Anka Muhlstein, husband-and-wife authors. ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • The other battlefield

    SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North By Thomas J. Sugrue Random House, 688 pp., illustrated, $35 Barack Obama's stunning rise to the White House has inspired hoorays as a mark of the phenomenal progress toward racial harmony in America. But Thomas J. Sugrue's study of the civil rights movement in the North suggests ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • How blue can you get?

    DELTA BLUES: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music By Ted Gioia Norton, 449 pp., illustrated, $27.95 "If soundscapes were as tangible as buildings," Ted Gioia says in his new music history, "Delta Blues," "grand pyramids and skyscrapers would rise high above the 38614 ZIP code." (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul By Patrick French Naipaul's life, full of entanglements and opposing selves, is admirably drawn in this new work (Knopf, $30). (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • Dark knights, with and without armor

    VEIL OF LIES: A Medieval Noir By Jeri Westerson St. Martin's Minotaur, 288 pp.,$24.95 THE FIRE KIMONO By Laura Joh Rowland St. Martin's Minotaur, 297 pp.,$24.95 DIVINE JUSTICE By David Baldacci Grand Central, 387 pp., $27.99 The dark streets of Jeri Westerson's debut novel, "Veil of Lies," are in 14th-century London. Crispin Guest is a fallen knight who wears a ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Stack dreams The town of Gilmanton, N.H. - which served as a model for the lust-ridden Peyton Place of Grace Metalious's novel - is writing its own story of unbridled passion. For a year-round library, that is. (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • A liquid masterpiece in five enigmatic parts

    2666 By Roberto Bolano Farrar, Straus & Giroux 898 pp., $30 Reviewing Roberto Bolano's "2666" is like reviewing the ocean. To call it a thing of nearly unfathomable breadth elides the intimacy of experiencing it; to focus on the relentless, pounding rhythm of its violence does no justice to its shimmering beauty. One strains to make sense of it, intuits ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Chet Raymo discusses "When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy," at 2 p.m., at Hingham Public Library, 66 Leavitt St., Hingham. (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • Pedestrian pursuits

    "Why," asked the second-century philosopher and physician Galen, "was man not given four legs and hands . . . like the centaur?" The reasons may be found in the doctor's treatise "On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body." Leaving the insurmountable philosophical problems for another day, we'll turn to the practical ones: "I should like to see a ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • The importance of being silent

    "Over the sea in the east the weather that has passed lies in a dark line at the far end of the world and it is warm now and a big sky rises like a film of blue over the whole of Denmark and behind it no one knows what there is." (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • Delivering darkness, light

    THE DOGHOUSE By Jan Thomas Harcourt, 40 pp., ages 3-7, $12.95 MY ONE HUNDRED ADVENTURES By Polly Horvath Schwartz & Wade, 272 pp., ages 8-12, $16.99 BLACK BOX By Julie Schumacher Delacorte, 176 pp., ages 13-18, $15.99 "The Doghouse" opens with a bright red ball bouncing into the nearby doghouse. It's the barnyard equivalent of kicking your ball onto the ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • Gargantuan

    SAMUEL JOHNSON: The Struggle By Jeffrey Meyers Basic, 528 pp., illustrated, $35 SAMUEL JOHNSON: A Biography By Peter Martin Harvard University, 608 pp., illustrated, $35 Two new biographies of Samuel Johnson, Peter Martin's "Samuel Johnson: A Biography" and Jeffrey Meyers's "Samuel Johnson: The Struggle," have appeared just in time for next year's tercentenary of his birth. Since James Boswell's biography ... (Boston Globe, 11/30/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Sea of Poppies By Amitav Ghosh A rich work of historical fiction that shows us the world in larger ways (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Inventing Vidia

    THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul By Patrick French Knopf, 554 pp., illustrated, $30 When he went to Oxford from the Caribbean in 1950, at age 17, V. S. Naipaul was a British subject of Indian descent who resided in the West Indies, specifically Trinidad, an "accidental occidental Indian from the most amusing ... (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Ed McClanahan reads from "O the Clear Moment," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . UMass-Boston creative writing faculty read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Gary Braver signs "Skin Deep," at 2 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, One Worcester Rd., Framingham. (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • So you think you can do theoretical physics?

    THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces By Frank Wilczek Basic, 270 pp., $26.95 REINVENTING GRAVITY: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein By John W. Moffat Collins/Smithsonian, 272 pp.,illustrated, $27.95 (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Owl, pop. 800, braces for storm

    DOWNTOWN OWL By Chuck Klosterman Scribner, 275 pp., $24 In his debut novel, Chuck Klosterman makes all the mistakes you'd expect of a best-selling pop culture critic who describes his own work as "philosophy for shallow people." He overwrites, for instance. Within the first 15 pages, we are subjected to a sun "burning and falling like the Hindenburg," the northern ... (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Inner workings David Macaulay's oversized illustrated books demystify all manner of machines and monumental buildings. Thirty-five years after his first book, "Cathedral," was published, he tackles the human body in his new one, "The Way We Work" (Houghton Mifflin). (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Short Takes

    SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD By Sarah Thornton Norton, 256 pp., $24.95 READ MY HEART: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution By Jane Dunn Knopf, 448 pp., $30 THE SCHOOL ON HEART'S CONTENT ROAD By Carolyn Chute Atlantic Monthly, 384 pp., $24 How does the product of one person's imagination move from a studio, to a gallery, ... (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • 'Same Man,' or odd couple?

    THE SAME MAN: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War By David Lebedoff Random House, 264 pp., illustrated, $26 In 1944 Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, appointed Evelyn Waugh as his assistant in a mission to secure support of Tito's Partisans for the Allies in the Balkans. One evening Randolph asked Waugh for his opinion of Winston Churchill's "Life ... (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Big draws

    AMERICAN WIDOW Written by Alissa Torres Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi Villard, 209 pp., $22 AFTER 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001-__) Written by Sid Jacobson Illustrated by Ernie Colón Hill & Wang, 149 pp., $16.95 (Boston Globe, 11/23/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Building a reputation A new collection of Ada Louise Huxtable's architecture criticism is as New York-centric as one might expect. After all, Huxtable has lived in the city for decades, writing for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal. (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Translator Craig Hill reads from "The Complete Fables of La Fontaine," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Poet Elizabeth Alexander reads at 3 p.m., at Concord Free Library, 129 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Wised up

    A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books By Alex Beam PublicAffairs, 245 pp., illustrated, $24.95 Where shall wisdom be found? (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life By Floyd Skloot Memoirist and poet Skloot revisits his past for clues as to what made him a writer (University of Nebraska, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • In 'Poppies,' an unusual quartet makes the voyage out

    SEA OF POPPIES By Amitav Ghosh Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 515 pp., $26 "Sea of Poppies," the first novel in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, follows a polyglot 19th-century cast from rural Bihar to exhilarating, crowded Calcutta to the perilous quarters of a sailing ship. As Ghosh writes historical fiction, his characters explore ways of recording history. (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Heroes, unsung and unstrung

    BOYS WILL BE BOYS: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty By Jeff Pearlman Harper, 416 pp., illustrated,$25.95 GOING DEEP: 20 Classic Sports Stories By Gary Smith Sports Illustrated, 416 pp., $26.95 BLOODY CONFUSED!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer By Chuck Culpepper Broadway, 272 pp., paperback,$13.95 OK, pop quiz. (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Overlooked agents of change

    THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies By Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson Norton, 576 pp., illustrated, $55 EATING THE SUN: How Plants Power the Planet By Oliver Morton Harper, 460 pp., illustrated,$28.95 My 4-year-old twins have an ant farm. It's made of green and clear plastic and is half full of white sand. A week ... (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Replaying the past

    I have been reading William Maxwell's "Later Novels and Stories," the second and final volume of the writer's work published on this centenary of his birth by the Library of America ($35). Like the earlier volume, the contents of this one - two novels, many short stories, and a collection of "improvisations" - have been selected by Christopher Carduff, who ... (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Applause for a new fright club

    In his elegant introduction to "Poe's Children: The New Horror - An Anthology" (Doubleday, $24.95), Peter Straub argues that the stories included represent "the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades." He should know. The author of 17 novels, including "The Hellfire Club" and "Mr. X," Straub has twice written in collaboration with Stephen King and ... (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • A leading man, always offstage

    GEORGE, BEING GEORGE: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals-- and a Few Unappreciative Observers Edited by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. Random House, 423 pp., illustrated, $30 The 200 voices recalling George Plimpton - lifelong editor of The Paris Review, silken writer about his bumbling amateur sorties into professional sports, and ... (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • Short Takes

    OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE By John McWhorter Gotham, 230 pp., $22.50 FAULT LINES By Nancy Huston Black Cat, 320 pp., paperback, $14 PAYBACK By Margaret Atwood House of Anansi, 280 pp., paperback, $15.95 How did English develop? We do not know for certain. But John McWhorter, linguist and raconteur, would find a telling clue in those two sentences. They both ... (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • The topping point

    OUTLIERS: The Story of Success By Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown, 309 pp., illustrated, $27.99 It's hard to resist Malcolm Gladwell. He's so darn enthusiastic. Reading one of his books is like sitting at the kitchen table while he runs about his house, pulling research studies out of file cabinets, thick biographies off bookshelves, and spreadsheets from his laptop. "Check this ... (Boston Globe, 11/16/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief By James M. McPherson Yet another life of Lincoln, brimming with fascinating details and great insight (Penguin, $35). A Better Angel By Chris Adrian Strange and unforgettable stories from the author of "The Children's Hospital" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,$23). The King's Gold By Arturo Pérez-Reverte The fourth novel in the consistently ... (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Doubts about the Bard Alex McNeil thrives on challenges of epic proportions. Back in the 1990s, he gathered details about 5,400 shows for his book " Total Television." (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • A brand-new bag

    THE HARDEST WORKING MAN: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America By James Sullivan Gotham, 244 pp., illustrated, $25 It has come to exemplify James Brown's near-mystical musical ability: the night he managed, with nothing more than the force of his personality and the sheer power of his band, to keep an entire city from rioting. It was April ... (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Golden fleeces

    LOOT:The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World By Sharon Waxman Times, 414 pp., illustrated, $30 Have you ever wondered why the Rosetta stone (so crucial to our understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics), discovered by Napoleon's army in 1799, is situated in the British Museum? Or why a Babylonian stele called the Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known legal ... (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Marrying memory to the creative impulse

    THE WINK OF THE ZENITH: The Shaping of a Writer's Life By Floyd Skloot University of Nebraska, 231 pp.,$24.95 A life story, Joseph Conrad has been quoted as saying, may be summarized on a matchbook: He was born, he suffered, he died. The rest is elaboration. (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Below the surface of slavery

    A MERCY By Toni Morrison Knopf, 169 pp., $23.95 "Don't be afraid," a narrator intones, and those opening words of Toni Morrison's ninth novel seem to offer comfort and a salve for the myriad wounds that lie ahead on these pages as well as this nation's weary soul. Set in a 17th-century America that has yet to declare its name, ... (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Short Takes

    DRINKING PROBLEMS AT THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH By Beth Teitell Morrow, 272 pp., $24.95 READ MY HEART: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution By Jane Dunn Knopf, 432 pp., $30 "There's a war afoot, a War on Aging, and hostilities are escalating." Beth Teitell is here to survey the terrain, assess the enemy, and lay out the battle ... (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Julia Glass reads from "I See You Everywhere," at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . John Stauffer discusses "Giants," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Robert Laughlin discusses "The Crime of Reason," at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Choose your partner

    KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD By Sandi Kahn Shelton Shaye Areheart, 400 pp., $23 TIME OF MY LIFE By Allison Winn Scotch Shaye Areheart, 304 pp., $23 THANK YOU FOR ALL THINGS By Sandra Kring Bantam, 448 pp.,paperback, $12 The first of these three novels is a romance, but it also draws on the difficulties of father-son relationships. The second ... (Boston Globe, 11/9/08)

  • Wonk the vote

    We are nearing the end of one of the most fascinating and important presidential races in the nation's history, and in two days voters will write the denouement of this sprawling saga. This seems the perfect time to sneak a last peek at a handful of books on electoral politics and policy in the hope that they will not just ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • In 'Major,' Harrison plots an impulsive odyssey

    THE ENGLISH MAJOR By Jim Harrison Grove, 255 pp., $24 "Wife. Farm. Dog. Gone." Cliff, the protagonist of Jim Harrison's "The English Major," finds himself at 60 detached from all that he has held dear, including Vivian, his wife of 38 years. Vivian is a real estate agent who likes butterscotch schnapps, snack food, and her old high-school sweetheart these ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • A gate-crasher with an attentive eye

    Comic novelist John Barth, the author most notably of "The Floating Opera," "The Sot-Weed Factor," "Chimera," and "Giles Goat-Boy," turns his wry gaze on retirement living in his latest collection, "The Development" (Houghton Mifflin, $23). These linked stories, set in the planned community of Heron Bay Estates, are by turns satirical and compassionate, political and personal, world-weary and even life-weary. ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Short Takes

    Peaches and Daddy By Michael M. Greenburg Overlook, 352 pp., illustrated, $25.95 The tabloid presses must have been kept running around the clock in the mid-1920s to churn out the latest buzz: Leopold and Loeb. Lucky Lindy. And the prurient sensation of the day, the marriage of 51-year-old New York real estate mogul and philanthropist Edward Browning to Frances "Peaches" ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • They can't take that away from me

    FRED ASTAIRE By Joseph Epstein Yale University, 198 pp., $22 "There should be a half dozen special words for the vastly entertaining dances by the Adaires," wrote Broadway critic Alexander Woollcott at the end of World War I, misspelling the family name. Performing with his sister Adele, Woollcott added, that "nimble and lack-a-daisical Adaire named Fred" is "one of those ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Adam Braver and Jenna Blum read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Margaret Cezair-Thompson reads from "The Pirate's Daughter," at 2 p.m., at Wellesley Free Library, 530 Washington St., Wellesley. . . . Susan Cheever reads from "Desire," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Poetry and motion Dan Chiasson, poetry critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review as well as a poet in his own right, has added a new title: poetry co-editor at The Paris Review. On the masthead of the fall issue, he replaces former US poet laureate Charles Simic. (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Idylls of the Toad

    This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of "The Wind in the Willows," by Kenneth Grahame. I have no idea why a great fuss hasn't been made of this; indeed, I only stumbled on the fact in the course of my daily routine of looking things up for no reason. I imagine that most people opening the Books ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • War president

    TRIED BY WAR: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF By James M. McPherson Penguin, 329 pp., illustrated, $35 He was the least likely of men to guide the United States through its most terrible of ordeals, the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was, too, a formerly obscure state legislator, a one-term congressman, and a failure in a bid for the US ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Eerie feasts for the ears

    ALREADY DEAD By Charlie Huston Blackstone Audio, unabridged fiction, eight CDs, nine hours, $80, narrated by Scott Brick; also available on 1 MP3 disc, $29.95, or seven cassettes, $59.95, or as a download from www.audible.com, $19.57 BITTEN: WOMEN OF THE OTHERWORLD, BOOK 1 By Kelley Armstrong Brilliance Audio, unabridged fiction, nine cassettes, 13 hours, $34.95, read by Aasne Vigesaa; also ... (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • New & Recommended

    A Better Angel By Chris Adrian Strange and unforgettable stories from the author of "The Children's Hospital" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23). (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Beyond Words

    The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet By David Okuefuna Princeton University, 334 pp., $49.50 (Boston Globe, 11/2/08)

  • Where Eagles dared

    The storied past of Boston College's football team tumbles out of a hefty new high-end scrapbook. Tucked into sleeves are vintage photographs (such as below), cartoons, bumper stickers, and BC songs and cheers. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Margaret Cezair-Thompson , Amy MacKinnon , and Peter Clenott speak at 3 p.m., at Fowler Library, 1322 Main St., W. Concord. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Selected from books recently reviewed in the Globe. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • Tricky treat

    It is only partly a criticism to suggest that the most scintillating thing in "The Widows of Eastwick" (those scandalous witches are now in their 60s, their wine turned to vinegar) is a snore. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • The spirits of New England

    If you're craving culture with your candy corn this Halloween, you don't have to look much further than the annals of New England's own literary tradition. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • Constant comment

    Here is all of it, all you wanted - and can take - of the epistolary "words in air" passed over a 30-year period (1947-77) between two of the most gifted poets in our last century's latter half. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • Toxins, terror, and a friendly ghost

    Bioterrorism gets its full quota of respect in Alex Kava's latest thrill ride, "Exposed." This time, FBI agent Maggie O'Dell is the victim of a particularly nasty bioterrorist attack. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • Short Takes

    "One principle governs all these things, a perfectly understandable principle, and the name of the principle is chance." Bolsover, the ordinary Englishman who narrates this odd and compelling novel, makes this pronouncement late in his perhaps probable, perhaps improbable story. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • The maladies of body and soul

    In the ecology of American literary imaginations, Chris Adrian is one of our oddest, loveliest night-bloomers. His debut novel, "Gob's Grief," told of two brothers heading off to the Civil War. (Boston Globe, 10/26/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Julia Glass reads from "I See You Everywhere," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Brian Jacques discusses "Doomwyte," at 2 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, 1 Worcester Rd., Framingham. (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Taking the reins in Spain

    The King's Gold By Arturo Perez-Reverte Putnam, 304 pp., $24.95 The Creator's Map By Emilio Calderón Penguin, 272 pp., $24.95 The Glass of Time By Michael Cox Norton, 583 pp., $24.95 Over the past month, as financial planets imploded, many people wondered where it all went wrong. Maybe the slide began when we emptied our purses of large metal discs ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • On China's new frontier

    "It takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe." That is just one minor revelation in Leslie T. Chang's fascinating new book, "Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China" (Spiegel & Grau, $26). Following two young women over three years, Chang powerfully conveys the individual reality behind China's 130 million migrant workers, the largest ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Allies, enemies

    Old World, New World: Great Britain and America From the Beginning By Kathleen Burk Atlantic Monthly, 797 pp., illustrated, $35 Once part of the British Empire, the United States now enfolds its former colonial master beneath the wings of its own empire (or hegemony, for those in denial), furnishing the United Kingdom with American weapons and expecting it to support ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Museums in print Harvard's Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums are closed for renovations until 2013, but it's not a total loss for art lovers. Some works have been moved to the Sackler Museum, and a few hundred are highlighted in the newly published "Harvard Art Museum/Handbook." (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Lodge looks soberly at death's 'long silence'

    Deaf Sentence By David Lodge Viking, 294 pp., $25.95 What linguistics professor Desmond Bates hears: "I do mend sherry. Crap and sargasso pained there." What was actually said to him: I do recommend Céret. Braque and Picasso painted there. (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Oh, behave!

    Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners By Laura Claridge Random House, 525 pp., $30 "There will be an empty chair at the deal table at Tony's, when the youngsters gather to discuss life, sex, literature, the drama, what is a gentleman, and whether or not to go on to Helen Morgan's Club when the place ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Do I hear $12 million? I do?

    The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art By Don Thompson Palgrave Macmillan, 268 pp., illustrated, $24.95 In "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol," the late, platinum-bewigged icon offered his advice on the purchase of outrageously expensive art. "Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting," he wrote. "I think you should take that money, tie it ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By Stieg Larsson A bestseller abroad, this debut crime novel features two indelible sleuths and admirable pacing (Knopf, $24.95). A Most Wanted Man By John le Carré A satisfyingly bleak novel of intrigue set in Hamburg (Scribner, $28). The Hemingses of Monticello By Annette Gordon-Reed A family history concentrating on Thomas Jefferson and the ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Dracula, defanged

    Although I wish the distinction belonged to something more esoteric, the scariest book I ever read was plain old "Dracula," by Bram Stoker. I can remember my 10-year-old self's horror at the most frightening (though not most loathsome) bit of all: the Count creeping down his castle wall, head first, as spotted by Jonathan Harker and recorded in his journal: ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Short Takes

    The General of the Dead Army By Ismail Kadare Translated, from the French, by Derek Coltman Arcade, 272 pp., $24.95 From our Western viewpoint, the Italian "boot" appears poised to punt Sicily deep into the Mediterranean. From the eastern Adriatic, however, it looks about to crush Albania under its heavy heel. This is what the long-silenced Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare ... (Boston Globe, 10/19/08)

  • Bookings

    TOMORROW: Greg Melville discusses "Greasy Rider," at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. . . . Kim Fellner discusses "Wrestling With Starbucks ," at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • New & Recommended

    A Most Wanted Man By John le Carré A satisfyingly bleak novel of intrigue set in Hamburg (Scribner, $28). The Hemingses of Monticello By Annette Gordon-Reed A family history concentrating on Thomas Jefferson and the children he had with Sally Hemings, his slave (Norton, $35). (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Grand design

    Champlain's Dream: The European Founding of North America By David Hackett Fischer Simon & Schuster, 834 pp.,illustrated, $40 (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Portrait of a tangled triangle

    The Three of Us: A Family Story By Julia Blackburn Pantheon, 313 pp., illustrated, $26 (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Reading for votes The Portsmouth Literary Festival has a new twist this year: New Hampshire's first "Literary Idol" contest. Ten writers will take to the stage to perform their best 500-word piece of fiction before a live audience and a panel of judges. (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Deaths in a cold climate (plus gloom and neurosis)

    The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By Stieg Larsson Knopf, 465 pp., $24.95 The Pyramid and Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries By Henning Mankell New Press, 392 pp., $26.95 Stieg Larsson is a member of a club few want to join: writers who die before their novels makes it big - in his case before they're even published. (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Family bonds, uneasy and eternal

    I See You Everywhere By Julia Glass Pantheon, 287 pp., $24.95 Who by Fire By Diana Spechler Harper Perennnial, 368 pp., paperback, $14.95 The Other Queen By Philippa Gregory Touchstone, 448 pp., $25.95 (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Boys to men

    The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future By Guy Garcia Harper, 300 pp., $24.95 (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • Short Takes

    Chicago By Alaa Al Aswany Translated, from the Arabic, by Farouk Abdel Wahab Harper, 342 pp., $25.95 "Life in America . . . is like American fruit: shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless," says a famous Egyptian heart surgeon who has lived well in America for 30 years to a young new Egyptian medical student in Chicago. The ... (Boston Globe, 10/12/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Hemingses of Monticello By Annette Gordon-Reed A family history concentrating on Thomas Jefferson and the children he had with Sally Hemings, his slave. (Norton, $35). (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Spy glass view

    A Most Wanted Man By John le Carré Scribner, 323 pp., $28 "A Most Wanted Man" is not a Cold War book, but it feels like one. There are no Soviet agents lurking among the pages, but there is a profusion of spies and agencies of spies patrolling the new fault lines between east and west. (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • An economic stand worth taking

    Robert Braile's review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book "This Land Is Their Land" (Boston Globe, Sept. 25) is a sterling example of swallowing camels while straining at gnats. He snipes at her tone, uses "liberal" as a code word for "needn't be taken seriously," and whines about her lack - in his mind - of 21st-century consciousness. All this as he ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Stories that are jeweled windows into characters

    Yesterday's Weather By Anne Enright Grove, 308 pp., $24 Writers who divide their creative time between novels and short stories have long debated the difference between them. Up to now, I've favored the idea that the short story writer knows her destination from the outset, while the novelist sets out to explore unknown terrain. But Anne Enright turns that distinction ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Tragedy, comedy that resonate

    Bikeman: An Epic Poem By Thomas F. Flynn Brilliance Audio, unabridged nonfiction, one hour and eight minutes, $14.95, read by Jim Dale; also available as a download from www.audible.com, $10.46 (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Shelf Life

    A tale of terror On Aug. 31, 1979, John Busby, a Falmouth policeman, was driving to work when a car pulled up alongside his, and shotgun blasts tore through him. He survived the ambush, but his face was shattered. His family was placed under 24-hour armed guard. Fearful that the shooter would return, Busby, his wife, and their three children ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • The shaping of a literary life

    Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry By Donald Hall Houghton Mifflin, 195 pp., $24 Donald Hall at 80 is widely admired for his poetry, winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award, among others, and a former US poet laureate. Hall also has been a longtime public figure in the world of poetry as a ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Know-it-all

    Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know By Randall Stross Free Press, 275 pp., $26 Historically, we Americans have always been audacious enough to ask: What's the big idea? We like to think big. The Founding Fathers had the high-minded foresight to envision liberty and justice for all. Our engineers reduced the time required for cross-country ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Joshua Henkin ("Matrimony") and Ellen Litman ("The Last Chicken in America") read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Short Takes

    Liberty By Garrison Keillor Viking, 257 pp., $25.95 Garrison Keillor's Midwestern Never-Never Land, Lake Wobegon, has seen many stirring Fourth of July celebrations, though few perhaps as dramatic as the one when Clint Bunsen was a boy, when a distant tornado rained three dozen bowling balls onto the parade out of a blue sky. But we digress. And, really, how ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Woolf's servants get their due

    Virginia Woolf spent her last morning with her maid, dusting. This telling detail is one of many that make Alison Light's "Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury," so lively and so revealing. Here Woolf's servants emerge from below stairs and Woolf herself is freshly - and compassionately - illuminated. (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • What's the matter with kids today? (And how to mentor)

    So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids By Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne Ballantine Books, 240 pp., $25 The Self Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance By Polly Young-Eisendrath Little Brown, 256 pp., $25.99 Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Beyond Words

    The Oxford Project Photographs by Peter Feldstein, Text by Stephen G. Bloom Welcome Books, 289 pp., $50 In 1984, Peter Feldstein acted on his offbeat idea to photograph everyone in rural Oxford, Iowa, population 676. Twenty years later, he returned to shoot them again, this time bringing along writer Stephen G. Bloom to interview the subjects about their lives. The ... (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • The hidden, joyful world of words

    As you are aware, shortly after his creation, Adam was given the task of naming everything, and if I know Adam, he did a dutiful, painstaking job; certainly there are no recorded complaints from on high. (Boston Globe, 10/5/08)

  • Old dominion

    The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family By Annette Gordon-Reed Norton, 798 pp., illustrated, $35 (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • British mysteries, Greek drama

    Daphne By Justine Picardie Bloomsbury, 405 pp., $25.99 The September Society By Charles Finch St. Martin's Minotaur, 320 pp., $24.95 (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • Short Takes

    To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed By Alix Kates Shulman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 180 pp., $22 (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • White vs. red, and other conflicts

    Red Knife By William Kent Krueger Atria, 320 pp., $25 Sweetheart By Chelsea Cain St. Martin's Minotaur, 328 pp., $24.95 It's a Crime By Jacqueline Carey Ballantine, 288 pp., $24 (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • The accused

    The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World By John Demos Viking, 318 pp., $25.95 (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Ploughshares contributors and editors read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Goldengrove By Francine Prose A family slowly lets go of grief in this complex, incisive narrative (Harper, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • Artful inscriptions of the past, inlaid on the present

    The People on Privilege Hill: And Other Stories By Jane Gardam Europa, 196 pp., paperback, $15.95 (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Buffett business Perhaps it's fitting that a new book about billionaire investor Warren Buffett has outsize ambitions. Bantam has printed a million copies of Alice Schroeder's 976-page biography, "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life." It goes on sale tomorrow. (Boston Globe, 9/28/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Bookish Brattleboro Brattleboro, Vt., is often described as a college town without a college. Downtown there's a food co-op, a number of cafes, and five independent bookstores, including Everyone's Books, where the focus is on social change, the environment, and multicultural children's books. (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Indignation By Philip Roth Roth's latest novel, an allegory on righteous anger, focuses on the son of a kosher butcher (Houghton Mifflin, $26). (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • A keen look at Boston's nature

    The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston By John Hanson Mitchell Beacon, 254 pp., $24.95 When Walter Muir Whitehill wrote the preface to the first edition of his classic "Boston: A Topographical History" back in 1959, he described his daily ramble from North Station to the Boston Athenaeum with a discerning, if not always approving, eye, ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • A moralist of hope

    I never met David Foster Wallace. Nor was I part of his cult, those who had read every word of his sprawling, 1,088-page novel "Infinite Jest," including the footnotes. I was more like a spotty but ardent admirer, who looked to his short stories and especially his essays for inspiration. (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Dark knights

    The Given Day By Dennis Lehane Morrow, 704 pp., $27.95 Seven years ago Boston's Dennis Lehane broke out from a chain of hard-boiled thrillers about a pair of police detectives to write "Mystic River." Still a thriller, still hard-boiled - though with a darkling and part-melted center - it goes on to portray a blue-collar neighborhood undone by the abduction ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Adrift in a dangerous world

    For reasons too many to say, I associate the autumn with the sea, for better or worse. I have never felt happier than I have at sea, or more terrified, or sicker if it comes to that. The passages in literature that have thrilled me most have almost all been sea battles and storms. Now I have had the great ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Superman, born in Cleveland

    Good Night, Leo: A Swashbuckling Bedtime Adventure By Charise Mericle Harper Robin Corey/Random House, 24 pp., ages 1-3, $6.99 Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman Written by Marc Tyler Nobleman Illustrated by Ross MacDonald Knopf, 40 pp., ages 6-12, $16.99 The Night I Freed John Brown By John Michael Cummings Philomel, 276 pp., ages 12-16, $17.99 It's bedtime for ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Short Takes

    I'll Have What She's Having By Daniel M. Kimmel Ivan R. Dee, 294 pp., illustrated, $26.95 In classic Hollywood romantic comedies, the hero and heroine "meet cute." Film critic and chronicler Daniel Kimmel "titles cute" in this homage to the genre, borrowing from "When Harry Met Sally . . ." the punch line that lingers long after the plot has ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • In 'Goldengrove,' a family slowly lets go of grief

    Goldengrove By Francine Prose Harper, 275 pp., $24.95 In a novel about a tragedy, few writers can render a sentence such as "The thought of bacon made me think there might be a reason to go on living" without it coming across as errant flippancy. Francine Prose is one of them. By the time we witness her character Nico's inkling, ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Conundrums and curiosities

    Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time By Michael Brooks Doubleday, 240 pp., $23.95 Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum By Richard Fortey Knopf, 335 pp., illustrated, $27.50 "The flesh of the tortoise is reported to be useful for fumigation and for countering magic tricks and poisons," ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Afghanistan as a question

    Nadeem Aslam is author of the outstanding "Season of the Rainbirds" and "Maps for Lost Lovers." His new novel, "The Wasted Vigil" (Knopf, $25), is a harrowing yet beautiful depiction of an Afghanistan mutilated by war and oppression. With astonishing lyricism and compassion Aslam creates unforgettable characters - English, Russian, Afghan, American - while telling a story that is as ... (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Yael Goldstein Love and Pagan Kennedy read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Allegra Goodman reads from "The Other Side of the Island," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 9/21/08)

  • Mad men

    Indignation By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 233 pp., $26 It was about time that Philip Roth chose "Indignation" for a title. Most any one of his other novels could have been called the same thing. What the past was to Proust, despair to Dostoyevsky, and melodramatic struggle to Dickens, outrage is to Roth. Well, sex too, you might say, but ... (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Alfred and Emily By Doris Lessing Part fiction, part family history, the Nobel laureate's book about her parents is episodic but evocative (Harper, $25.95). (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • Short Takes

    Epilogue: A Memoir By Anne Roiphe Harper, 224 pp., $24.95 After her husband's sudden death, Anne Roiphe, nearing 70, had to remake not only her life but her self. And it was a difficult, undignified, and often embarrassing task. She found that she was of two minds about most things, including the essentials - who she was and what she ... (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • The coffee trade, from the grounds up

    The Various Flavors of Coffee By Anthony Capella Bantam, 548 pp., $22 Family Sold Separately By Kate Long Ballantine, 352 pp., paperback, $14 Live a Little By Kim Green 5 Spot, 367 pp., paperback, $13.99 (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Chills from the north "Otherworldly Maine" is a collection of darkly imaginative stories that evoke the state's eerie bogs, deep woods, and the spirit of its most famous writer, Stephen King. (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • The wild bunch, up close

    The Full Burn: On the Set, at the Bar, Behind the Wheel, and Over the Edge with Hollywood Stuntmen By Kevin Conley Bloomsbury, 214 pp., illustrated, $25.99 (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • Righting the left

    Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism By Bernard-Henri Levy Translated, from the French, by Benjamin Moser Random House, 233 pp., $25 (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: John Hanson Mitchell reads from "The Paradise of All These Parts," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Sam Cornish and other poets read at 2 p.m., Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • Many lifetimes, effortlessly drawn

    The Size of the World By Joan Silber Norton, 322 pp., $23.95 Joan Silber, 2005 National Book Award finalist, has written a sublime and humane jigsaw puzzle of a novel. Through her wide-angled lens, she spans decades, cultures, countries, then zooms in on six characters' particularized points of view: (Boston Globe, 9/14/08)

  • When winning also means losing

    Six Good Innings: How One Small Town Became a Little League Giant By Mark Kreidler Harper, 247 pp., $24.95 A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL By Stefan Fatsis Penguin, 340 pp., illustrated, $25.95 Olympic Industry Resistance: Challenging Olympic Power and Propaganda By Helen Jefferson Lenskyj State University of New York, 182 pp., ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • From Bloomsbury, a drudge report

    Over the years I have given assorted thought to the servant question. When my mother married, she believed she was embarking on the life of the mind and assumed through some outlandish logic that she would soon have the wherewithal to employ one or two excellent creatures to take care of housework and childcare: a vain expectation that blighted all ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Dr. Thomas Graboys reads from "Life in the Balance," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Back at home, troubled siblings look for refuge

    Home By Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 325 pp., $25 While Marilynne's Robinson's new novel, "Home," is not a sequel, it does return to the same time period and Iowa small town of her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gilead." But here, Rev. John Ames, the aging first-person narrator of "Gilead," is a minor character. The book instead focuses on the family ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Secret service

    The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington By Jennet Conant Simon & Schuster, 393 pp., illustrated, $27.95 (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Weighing what might have been

    Alfred and Emily By Doris Lessing Harper, 274 pp., illustrated, $25.95 A year ago Harvey Blume interviewed Doris Lessing for the Globe's Ideas section, and in hindsight two parts stand out as ironic. When asked why she thought she hadn't won a Nobel Prize, Lessing said that "a little gray chap" from the Nobel Committee had once told her she ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Short Takes

    What I Talk About When I Talk About Running By Haruki Murakami Translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel Knopf, 175 pp., $21 (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • New & Recommended

    One More Year By Sana Krasikov Stories about immigrants from the former Soviet Union that showcase clear-sighted, moving prose (Spiegel & Grau, $21.95). (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Recycling

    Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance By Mark Richardson Knopf, 274 pp., $25 They're called Pirsig Pilgrims, the motorcycle enthusiasts who follow the route from Minnesota to California that inspired Robert Pirsig's surprise 1974 chart-busting book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Pirsig's original ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Lessons for teens, and an anxious cat

    Splat the Cat By Rob Scotton HarperCollins, 40 pp., ages 3-7, $16.99 House of Dance By Beth Kephart HarperTeen, 272 pp., ages 13-18, $16.99 Undercover By Beth Kephart HarperTeen, 288 pp., ages 13-18, $16.99 Rob Scotton's latest picture book, "Splat the Cat," speaks for every child fearfully approaching the first day of school. For "wide awake" Splat, it was "his ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Literary Salem Salem - the setting for two acclaimed new novels - is celebrating its literary heritage and promise. Brunonia Barry's "Lace Reader" (Morrow) is a contemporary tale about women who can divine the future in patterns of lace. Last week a novel based on the life of Martha Carrier, hanged as a witch in Salem, hit bookstores. "The Heretic's ... (Boston Globe, 9/7/08)

  • Shelf life

    Earth science In last year's international bestseller "The World Without Us," environmental reporter Alan Weisman imagined what might happen to the earth if humans disappeared. "I came out of the project far less worried [about the earth] than when I went into it," he wrote in an e-mail from his home in Cummington. "We're giving it a battering that now ... (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Violence blows through broken lives

    Carolyn D. Wall's "Sweeping Up Glass" opens with a sustained wolf's howl and gunshots. It's 1938 and Olivia, a widow raising her young grandson Will'm, knows hunters are trespassing, shooting wolves that have lived peaceably for 65 years on her spread on the side of a Kentucky mountain. (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Short takes

    Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum By Richard Fortey Knopf, 335 pp., illustrated, $27.50 (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Plying the waters, by boat, map, and memory

    He couldn't get in much sooner because work on his family's nearly 70-year-old Herreshoff 12 1/2 turned out to be much more extensive than he'd anticipated, as he explains in "Sloop." (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Borrowed time

    One More Year: Stories By Sana Krasikov Spiegel & Grau, 229 pp., $25 In the story "Better Half" in Sana Krasikov's debut collection of stories, a young woman, Anya, moves from Russia to America to begin a new life. She marries but soon finds that her husband is selfish and immature. One night, during an argument, they begin to fight, ... (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • New & recommended

    Man in the Dark By Paul Auster Demonstrating the power of stories to sustain us, Auster artfully conflates the real and imagined (Holt, $23). (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Bookings

    TUESDAY: Alvin F. Oickle reads from "Disaster in Lawrence," at 6 p.m., at the Lawrence Public Library, 51 Lawrence St., Lawrence. (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • A life in endless replay

    The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living With the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science By Jill Price With Bart Davis Free Press, 263 pp., $26 (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Darkness visible

    Julian Barnes tries; he tries mightily and repeatedly in these protracted variations on and digressions away from the Big Last Thing. But in the end, like Emily Dickinson, he hasn't been able to Stop for Death, and plainly (barring a late unwelcome word before this gets into print) Death hasn't Stopped for Him. (Boston Globe, 8/31/08)

  • Western unions

    I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage By Susan Squire Bloomsbury, 258 pp., $25.99 There's certainly much to be contrary about when it comes to marriage. Gleaning from recent headlines alone, you've got gay marriage in California, the marriage of prepubescent girls to middle-aged men in Yemen, the perilous state of Madonna's marriage, and the five-times-married-and-fives-times-widowed Ohio woman who has ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Jenna Ringelheim discusses "Best Hikes With Dogs," at 4 p.m., in Winthrop Park, Harvard Square, Cambridge (dogs invited); for more information, visit www.globecorner.com/events. (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Closing ceremony An art gallery in Newburyport devoted to the work of children's-book illustrators is closing after seven years in business. Paul and Mary McDonough, co-owners of Child at Heart Gallery, will continue to sell art online. (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar By Paul Theroux Theroux's re-creation of his epic 1970s train tour of Asia is a rewarding journey (Houghton Mifflin, $28). (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • The poet and the colonel

    White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson By Brenda Wineapple Knopf, 416 pp., illustrated, $27.95 "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" The question was Emily Dickinson's, put in 1862 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose essays she had read in The Atlantic. One of them, "A Letter to a Young Contributor," ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • Journalism

    New England has a leg up on the rest of the nation when it comes to the literati. For one thing, the first literary magazine in the nation was founded here: the North American Review, born in Boston in 1815 in an effort, according to the review, to "rival the leading British magazines." The journal was started by William Tudor ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • You want fries with that

    In the 1950s, my Midwestern grandfather built a "cook shack," as he called it, to recapture his young manhood as a (failed) homesteader in Alberta, Canada. It was enclosed on only three sides and equipped with a wood-burning range, which itself was fitted out with innumerable chambers, vessels, doors, lids, and vents, and a griddle so smooth and seasoned it ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • Short Takes

    Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages By Ammon Shea Perigee, 223 pp., $21.95 Some men set out to climb Mount Everest. Ammon Shea set out to read the Oxford English Dictionary full time, from cover to cover. Or rather covers to covers, his recent job as a furniture mover providing handy preparation for hoisting its 20 hefty ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • The world is flat, and other myths

    Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization By David Singh Grewal Yale University, 416 pp., $30 The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape By Harm De Blij Oxford University, 304 pp., $27.95 Freedom is Americans' supreme value, but how well do we really understand it? Consider this proposition: "Your money or your life!" Strictly speaking, we are ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • In 'Man,' Auster conjures crises real and fantastic

    Man in the Dark By Paul Auster Holt, 180 pp., $23 The opening paragraphs of Paul Auster's 14th novel, "Man in the Dark," seem to presage a work of Beckett-like detachment and interiority, steered less by the real world than by the fabulous, absurdist meanderings of the mind. "I am alone in the dark," narrator August Brill announces as the ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • Playing with words, perceptions

    Matthew Kneale studied modern history at Oxford before teaching English in Japan, where he started writing. His novels include "Whore Banquets" (Somerset Maugham Award) and the superb "English Passengers" (Whitbread Prize). Kneale's new novel, "When We Were Romans" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95 ), is narrated by 9-year-old Lawrence, whose mother hastily transplants the family from Scotland to Rome because, she ... (Boston Globe, 8/24/08)

  • To the woods, 'to live deliberately'

    Meet Neil Countryman. You have met his type in fiction before. He's an ordinary guy, but he has passed through the orbit of a character who is bigger, brighter (or darker), and surely more intense than anyone he has ever met. Think of Nick Carraway recounting the last days of his ambitious friend in "The Great Gatsby" or Ishmael watching Ahab hurl harpoons at fate in "Moby-Dick." (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • America 1.0

    W. H. Auden once said that although there are good books that are only for adults, there are no good books that are only for children. And since we have limited space, we'll plunge right in - children's books with plenty of allure for adults. (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Echoes of war and laughter

    The first of these four engaging novels pays lively homage to the pleasures of reading, while the others touch entertainingly on a Canadian coming-of-age, psychic skills, and archeological secrets. (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Short Takes

    A Stopover in Venice By Kathryn Walker Knopf, 305 pp., $24.95 Fairy tales do come true. Here the princess plucks herself out of her dreary prison and stumbles on a fairy godmother, who invites her into an enchanted wonderland. Instead of scampering mice, there is a charming Chihuahua, who leads the desperate young woman, Nel, to Lucy, an aged countess ... (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Return ticket

    If it's true that books themselves face obsolescence, perhaps it's fair to wonder whether a rather old-fashioned, unanchored travelogue - I went here and there; I saw this and that - like Paul Theroux's "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star," a re-creation of Theroux's once-epic journey from west to east chronicled over 30 years ago in his celebrated bestseller, "The Great Railway Bazaar," might point the way to the exit. (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Our bacteria, ourselves: appreciating E. coli

    At birth, a baby's digestive system is a sterile, undiscovered continent. Then the world gets hold of it. Within minutes, microbes have started pouring in from every direction. They come from the birth canal, from the mother's breast milk, from the fingertips of nurses and the lips of happy relatives. (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Shelf Life

    The newly opened Used Book Superstore in Burlington has a pricing strategy that echoes its name: All books are sold for 10 percent of the original price, with a $1 minimum. (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Night of the Gun By David Carr Journalistic solidity combines with memory in this unusual memoir of addiction and recovery (Simon & Schuster, $26). (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Bookings

    TOMORROW: Sana Krasikov and Keith Gessen read at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline. (Boston Globe, 8/17/08)

  • Short Takes

    When, more earnestly than wisely, William Patten plucked his formidable mother from her Washington, D.C., town house and installed her in an upscale drunk tank, she retaliated by calling him a bastard - in the most literal sense. His father, she informed her middle-aged son, was not the late William Sr. but her erstwhile lover, the dashing Englishman Duff Cooper, confidant to kings and prime ministers. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • Connecticut Yankee home

    Jon Clinch, whose debut novel, "Finn," owes a literary debt to Mark Twain, has joined the effort to keep Twain's house in Hartford open to the public. On Sept. 23, Clinch and 10 other writers, including Phillip Lopate and Stewart O'Nan, will give a reading to benefit the Mark Twain House and Museum. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • In 'Requiem,' Dufresne overdoes the dysfunction

    I admire John Dufresne's early work, especially "Louisiana Power and Light" and "Love Warps the Mind a Little," two books that provided readers deeply affecting stories told from odd angles of perception. The result in those works was what we all look for in books: good stories well told. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poet-editors David Barber, Major Jackson, and John Skoyles read at 4 p.m., at the Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • On the path of the righteous

    Knowing the ghoulish interest I take in crackpots of every stripe, a friend of mine steered me toward Jane Fletcher Geniesse's "American Priestess: The Extraordinary Story of Anna Spafford and the American Colony in Jerusalem" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26). This is a huge book in scope, being an account of a group of Chicagoans and Swedes who traveled to Jerusalem ... (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • Diversions at every turn

    The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller By Jeffery Deaver and others Audible.com and International Thriller Writers, unabridged fiction, seven hours and 34 minutes, read by Alfred Molina, available as a download from audible.com, $19.95. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Selected from books recently reviewed in the Globe. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • Light on a poet's imagination, and an era

    Brenda Wineapple's "Hawthorne: A Life" (2003) was an incomparable portrait of the man, the writer, and his time. Now, in "White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson" (Knopf, $27.95), Wineapple similarly reanimates the poet and her "Perceptor" in a dual biography of astonishing depth and grace. "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse ... (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • Lost in the gulag

    On a snowy night in Moscow in February 1939, three men wearing badges that identified them as members of Josef Stalin's secret police walked through the double doors of the Moskva Hotel, overlooking Red Square, took an elevator to the top floor, and knocked on a door. They knew that the man they had come for carried a Czech passport - fabricated for him by someone in their organization - and that he spoke fluent French and German, though little Russian. They also knew the name on his passport was an alias. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • Grim notes from underground

    What use is grace unless it's under pressure? Never mind the crystalline quality of the water if it merely dribbles from the tap. David Carr's weekly "Media Equation" column, in The New York Times, is one of the most lucid and transparent of its news columns. Cutting fine but deep, Carr's ideas land on paper with little of the transmission loss that writer stylistics can leach from a writer's thought. And they are propelled by indignation, though schooled. (Boston Globe, 8/10/08)

  • A reader's guide to literary Boston

    Over more than 350 years, dozens of authors have written lyrically -- and knowingly -- about Boston. In fact, they started doing so even at its birth. John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, envisioned it in 1630 as a shining "city on a hill." Oliver Wendell Holmes called the State House in 1858 "the hub of the Solar ... (Globe Correspondent, 8/10/08)

  • Short Takes

    The Lace Reader By Brunonia Barry Morrow, 390 pp., $24.95 From the start we are told that Towner Whitney is a nutcase and a fibber, by Towner herself. Still, it's hard not to believe her version of things, which begins with her return after 20 years to her home in Massachusetts from California in response to the disappearance of her ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • When a child vanishes, ghosts follow

    What Was Lost By Catherine O'Flynn Holt, 246 pp., paperback, $14 Childhood: not just another country or even another planet, but, in Catherine O'Flynn's delicate wilderness of a first novel, a tiny asteroid on collision course with our bloated planet. (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • The top 5 picture books in New England

    1. "Puff, the Magic Dragon," written by Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton, illustrated by Eric Puybaret (Sterling, hardcover) 2. "Fancy Nancy: Bonjour, Butterfly," written by Jane O'Connor, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperCollins, hardcover) 3. "Where the Wild Things Are," by Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins, paperback) 4. "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom," written by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault, illustrated by ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • A pastiche of facts about fiction

    The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, and Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Indexes By Adam Thirlwell Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 558 pp.,illustrated, $30 Adam Thirlwell is a talented young literary Brit, and "The Delighted States" is a clever if rambling treatise ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poet Currier Smith reads at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • New & Recommended

    An Expert in Murder By Nicola Upson Novelist Josephine Tey is a character in this murder mystery, replete with red herrings and secret identities (Harper, $24.95). Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World By David Maraniss A satisfying blend of exhaustive research and well-paced narration (Simon & Schuster, $26.95). The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's Century By ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Mapping the world Reif Larsen's unfinished thesis for a master's degree in fine arts at Columbia University is a hot property in the publishing world. An illustrated debut novel titled "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet," it was bought by Penguin Press for about $900,000 earlier this summer, according to Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter. (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • Rightmare

    The Wrecking Crew By Thomas Frank Metropolitan, 369 pp., $25 If there's one thing Thomas Frank has, it's certitude. As a result, he has been singularly successful in getting his political views noticed, which, of course, is his goal. No self-doubt restrains his assaults; no nuance clutters his pages; his are books not of arguments but of pronouncements. Frank clearly ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • The funny business of change

    Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss By Danica McKellar Hudson Street, 335 pp., $24.95 Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar . . . : Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes By Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein Penguin, 224 pp., paperback, $12 A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television By Jeff ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • Buying and nothingness

    Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are By Rob Walker Random House, 291 pp., illustrated, $25 OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder -The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion By Lucas Conley PublicAffairs, 230 pp., $22.95 Wacky Packages By Topps Co. Abrams, 237 pp., illustrated, $19.95 I drive a Scion xB. The stimulus for ... (Boston Globe, 8/3/08)

  • A tale of love and exploration

    Christina Thompson grew up privileged in the upscale Boston suburb of Lincoln. If she had fulfilled the destiny that seemingly awaited her, she might "have stayed home and married a radiologist," she says. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Artful homage offers Tey and sympathy

    One of the earliest mystery novels that swept me away was "Brat Farrar," by Josephine Tey (pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh). I went on to devour the rest of Tey's slender output and all the novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and the modern heir to the classic British detective novel, P. D. James. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Dark prophet

    Is Philip K. Dick the father of the paranoid style in American fiction? "Every pay phone in the world was tapped," a character thinks in "A Scanner Darkly." "Or if it wasn't some crew somewhere just hadn't gotten around to it." (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Selected from books recently reviewed in the Globe. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • 'Twilight' 's last gleaming

    "Breaking Dawn" (Little, Brown), the final installment in Stephenie Meyer's well-loved vampire series, the Twilight Saga, won't be released until 12:01 a.m. Saturday, but it's already breaking records. For weeks, advance sales of the young-adult novel have kept it in the No. 1 spot at Amazon.com. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • A warning about 'false science'

    Law professor Victoria Nourse has long been fascinated by a relatively obscure case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, in which inmates from Oklahoma's McAlester prison challenged that state's 1935 sterilization laws. Twenty-seven other states had sterilization statutes aimed at those who were imprisoned, insane, deaf, blind, or otherwise deemed unsound, and thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized before the Supreme Court ruled ... (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Getting played

    In the old days of college athletics, there used to be something called a walk-on. Lots of colleges had them. They were kids who'd played a sport in high school and figured they'd give it another shot when they got to campus. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Short Takes

    In "The Eaves of Heaven" Andrew Pham undertakes the doubly unsettling project of ventriloquizing the life story of his father, Thong Van Pham, a survivor of tumultuous times in Vietnam, a nation victimized by French occupation and Japanese invasion, by Ho Chi Minh's ruthless Viet Minh, and by the blunt force of American military might. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Shell games, canine confessions

    I wish I'd had a board book like Smithsonian's "My Shell Book" back when my children were babies and toddlers, stopping at every beach we could find. Back then, board books limited themselves to a narrow domesticity like sitcoms from the 1950s: The images and objects pictured never, ever left the house. Such books made a baby's life seem as constrained as a playpen. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • In 'Condition,' an ailment affects an entire family

    A Pen/Hemingway winner for her first novel, "Mrs. Kimble," Jennifer Haigh has written an enjoyable, well-constructed third book that most readers will find absorbing. True, there's a "but" coming, although best to start with the novel's strengths. (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Lloyd Schwartz and others read from the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop at 4 p.m., at the Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. . . . Sheridan Hay and Steve Almond speak at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Patrick Papatiti, a leader of the Maasai in southern Kenya, speaks at 2 ... (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • Ratcheting down the suspense

    The reading person's crimes are not many outside of mutilating or damaging books and not returning them to their owners. Well, there is also an act, a sin rather than a crime, which I used to consider thoroughly dissolute but which now, hardened by the rigors of professional reading, I commit regularly. I refer to looking ahead to see how ... (Boston Globe, 7/27/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company By David A. Price The history of the firm whose string of blockbusters has sparked a renaissance in Hollywood animation (Knopf, $27.95). (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Disputing 'Side Effects'

    I am writing to express my disappointment at the inflammatory review of Alison Bass's book, "Side Effects" ("The unhealthy ties that bind FDA to drug firms," July 5). Judging by the statements in the review, "Side Effects" is inaccurate and does not reflect the facts related to paroxetine as we know them and as have been shared publicly. (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Rethinking the Reagan supremacy

    The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 By Sean Wilentz Harper, 564 pp., illustrated, $27.95 Ronald Reagan "changed the trajectory of America," Barack Obama proclaimed in January. Presiding over a re-energized Republican "party of ideas," Obama opined, Reagan tapped the aspirations and addressed the apprehensions of average Americans, who were hungry for clarity, confidence, and "a return to that sense ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • A DJ seeks the beat in Berlin

    Slumberland By Paul Beatty Bloomsbury, 243 pp., $24.99 Two of the liveliest strains of contemporary fiction find their roots in different strands of popular culture: hip white guys like Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem take inspiration from the comic books of their youth, and the concomitant fascination with genre and role-playing, while writers like Colson Whitehead, Junot Díaz, ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • James bonds

    House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family By Paul Fisher Holt, 693 pp., illustrated, $35 Over the past decades, beginning with F. O. Matthiessen's "The James Family" (1947), many biographies and portraits of various Jameses have appeared. Notable among them are ones by Alfred Habegger on Henry James Sr., Robert D. Richardson on William James, Jean Strouse ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Bookings

    TOMORROW: Ann Hood reads from "Comfort," at 7 p.m., at Hingham Public Library, 66 Leavitt St., Hingham. . . . Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez discusses "Dirty Girls on Top," at 6 p.m., at Borders Back Bay, 511 Boylston St. . . . Poet Martha Rhodes and writer Dean Albarelli read at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Spirituality books in New England

    1. "The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity," by William P. Young (Windblown, paperback) 2. "Ninety Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life," by Don Piper (Baker , paperback) (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Olympus on fire

    Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, 478 pp., illustrated, $26.95 The world, and not just Rome, was a fascinating and frightening place in 1960, full of promise and peril, hope, unrest, and almost incomprehensible complexity. The Cold War, with the forces of communism and capitalism at loggerheads, appeared to be building inexorably ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Stage craft The Federal Theatre Project was among the most innovative and controversial initiatives of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. For four years, the project provided jobs for actors, writers, and directors and produced cutting-edge theater; it also helped to launch the careers of Orson Welles, John Houseman, Arthur Miller, and Elia Kazan. (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Paradises wounded, but not lost

    The Wild Places By Robert Macfarlane Penguin, 340 pp., paperback, $15 Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains By Barbara Hurd University of Georgia, 160 pp., $22.95 Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators By William Stolzenburg Bloomsbury, 291 pp., $24.99 If you're worried about the future of ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • Short takes

    The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's Century By Alice Fulton Norton, 254 pp., $23.95 These beautiful connected stories feature several generations of good Catholic women in upstate New York. Ruth is introduced in the 1960s as "the loneliest girl in North America. . . . the only Catholic High student who subscribed to Zen Teen, the Journal of ... (Boston Globe, 7/20/08)

  • An American tragedy, heavy on the portents

    America America By Ethan Canin Random House, 458 pp., $27 The vast Metarey estate in upstate New York, once a place of graciousness and patrician philanthropy, has been demolished to make way for a shopping mall. The great oaks are gone; the bronze replica of an oak tree stands at the entrance. (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Darin Strauss and Salvatore Scibona read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Betsy Block reads from "The Dinner Diaries," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Midlands, mystery, and a mall

    Catherine O'Flynn's first novel, "What Was Lost" (Holt, paperback, $14), is not only a convincing mystery and a wonderfully evocative picture of childhood, it is also a tremendously funny depiction of life in and around a British shopping mall, a world that O'Flynn, a former mall employee, knows intimately. Through the eyes of 10-year-old Kate, one of modern fiction's most ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Shelf Life

    In short order At Rose Metal Press, less is more. Since its founding in 2006, the Brookline-based nonprofit has published four collections of short short fiction. (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Code red

    The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain By George Lakoff Viking, 292 pp., $25.95 A better title for George Lakoff's new book, "The Political Mind," might have been "Invasion of the Brain Snatchers." Lakoff's provocative thesis is that for several decades "radical conservatives" have managed to change our brains, causing Americans to elect ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Short Takes

    Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It By Elizabeth Royte Bloomsbury, 248 pp., $24.99 As if we needed another sign of the decline and fall, Elizabeth Royte notes the ubiquitous bottles of water sticking out of the purses and pockets of Americans as we rush off to work, to school, to the gym, and asks a ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Burdens behind a mysterious death, an imminent birth

    No One You Know By Michelle Richmond Delacorte, 306 pp., $23 How Far Is the Ocean From Here By Amy Shearn Shaye Areheart, 320 pp., $23 The Wednesday Sisters By Meg Waite Clayton Ballantine, 304 pp., $23 An Absolute Scandal By Penny Vincenzi Doubleday, 575 pp., $24.95 The first two of these four novels are thoughtful, involving, intricately constructed, and ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • James gang: bigger than you thought

    It is said that in 1876, my great-grandmother, then a girl growing up on a farm in Minnesota, was surprised at her chores by one of the James brothers - Jesse or Frank - stepping out of the woods and politely asking for dinner. She brought him to the house, where her mother fed him, and after he left, thanking ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • A juggernaut named Pixar

    The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company By David A. Price Knopf, 308 pp., illustrated, $27.95 We'll set out the disclaimer straight away: In the computer-animated Pixar film "Monsters, Inc.," the character of James P. "Sulley" Sullivan is in no way based on this reviewer. My middle initial is not P., I've never used an "e" in the nickname, ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Weighing in on the data

    Thank you for reviewing the book "Party Crashing," by Keli Goff ("Hip-Hop, the Era," June 22). Unfortunately, the review by Saul Austerlitz incorrectly states that the book's thesis is based on interviews with just 12 subjects. To the contrary, Ms. Goff's findings were based on extensive survey research of 400 African-Americans in the age demographic on which her book focuses, ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • Thrillers, from wild to mild

    China Lake By Meg Gardiner Brilliance Audio, unabridged fiction, 10 CDs, 12 hours, $36.95, read by Tanya Eby Sirois; also available on an MP3 disc, $24.95, or as a download from audible.com, $17.47 (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • In other words

    The greatest theatrical, literary, and musical works are magnetic - they continually attract reinterpretation and modernization. Mozart's 220-year-old "Don Giovanni" has been updated with bra-and-panty-clad choristers, Shakespeare's 400-year-old "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with rock 'n' roll. Aristophanes's plays have been slangified to hell and back, and Dante's "Commedia" has turned up in every literary style from terza rima to no ... (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Cost By Roxana Robinson A family struggles with a son's addiction in this exploration of the nature and limits of responsibility (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). (Boston Globe, 7/13/08)

  • A swiftly tilting planet

    Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators By William Stolzenburg Bloomsbury, 291 pp., $24.99 One summer day not long ago, I rose before dawn and drove into Yellowstone National Park from the east, stopping at the broad Lamar Valley and hiking a few hundred feet up from the road to a ... (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • Short Takes

    The Romantics By Galt Niederhoffer St. Martin's, 277 pp., $23.95 Galt Niederhoffer hangs her well-worn romantic tale on the contemporary obsessions with WASP wedding etiquette and post-collegiate Ivy League competitiveness. The group of friends at the center of this three-day wedding romp attended Yale together. Except for Laura, the complicated dark Jew, and Tom, the artistic Catholic, the rest belong ... (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Family fuel Barbara Kingsolver's family moved from Arizona to a farm in Virginia so they could grow most of their food and buy the rest locally. The bestseller "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" is her chronicle of the one-year experiment. (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Story of Edgar Sawtelle By David Wroblewski An ambitious first novel, set in rural Wisconsin, that draws on "Hamlet" (Ecco, $25.95). The Lazarus Project By Aleksandar Hemon Two narratives 100 years apart trace the disillusion and dislocation of the immigrant experience (Riverhead, $24.95). The Secret Scripture By Sebastian Barry In Ireland past and present, a doctor and patient plumb ... (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • Under siege, the West's public lands vanish or become fragmented

    Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America By Stephen Trimble University of California, 319 pp., illustrated, $29.95 "Bargaining for Eden" is a book that starts slow, as it reports on a story so familiar to even a casual student of the exploitation of the West's once-bountiful and vibrant natural resources that there's not a lot ... (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • A family's fault lines, newly exposed

    Cost By Roxana Robinson Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 420 pp., $25 Halfway through Roxana Robinson's absorbing new novel, "Cost," Steven Lambert wonders, "How did you decide when you should take over someone's life?" He soon finds out the answer when his divorced parents, Julia and Wendell, use every means at their disposal to garner control over their younger ... (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • The lives of others

    How to Do Biography: A Primer By Nigel Hamilton Harvard University, 379 pp., $22.95 Biography: A User’s Guide By Carl Rollyson Ivan R. Dee, 321 pp.,$27.50 (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • When bad things happen to good athletes

    Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America By Charles Leerhsen Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., illustrated, $26 Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams By Jennifer Sey Morrow, 304 pp., illustrated, $24.95 Play Hard, Die Young: Football Dementia, Depression, and Death By Bennet Omalu Neo ... (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • Bookings

    TOMORROW: Zoë Ferraris reads from "Finding Nouf," at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 7/6/08)

  • Bending another writer's spine

    Tom Wolfe, author of "The Right Stuff" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities" "Currently I'm reading Life on the Hyphen, by Gustavo Perez Firmat. The hyphen in the title is the hyphen in the term 'Cuban-American.' The book has some wonderful descriptions of the tug of war that goes on between the forces on either side of the hyphen." (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poet Carolyn Forche reads at 4 p.m., at the Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • In baffling case, Aix marks the spot

    Cézanne's Quarry By Barbara Pope Pegasus, 352 pp., $25 Eight in the Box By Raffi Yessayan Ballantine, 274 pp., $25 The Foreigner By Francie Lin Picador, 320 pp., paperback, $14 Barbara Pope takes a whiff of historical evidence that artist Paul Cézanne had a love affair with a mysterious woman when he was painting the mountains and quarries of Aix-en-Provence, ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Tragedy and tributes Wolfgang K. Vorwerk, Germany's consul general in Boston for the past four years, made it his mission to reach out to Jewish community leaders and Holocaust survivors throughout New England. (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • I spend, therefore I am

    Since the 17th century and the dawning of the secular age, the great unanswered question in the West has been why anyone in his right mind would care about anyone else. It was clear, and still is to some extent, that most people do seem to care about other people, and, certainly, almost all of us actually feel that we ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • A wordless hero evokes echoes of the Bard

    The Story of Edgar Sawtelle By David Wroblewski Ecco, 566 pp., $25.95 There are many reasons one might be drawn to David Wroblewski's ambitious first novel, "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle." First of all, one has to have a heart of stone to dismiss a tale of a boy and his dog - or, in this case, a boy and ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Short Takes

    Dreaming Up America By Russell Banks Seven Stories, 127 pp., $21.95 Asked by a documentary filmmaker to do nothing less than explain American history and its impact on our national character to the French, who know us largely from the movies and newspaper headlines, novelist Russell Banks extemporized at length and with such lucidity that the transcript has been published ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Dream time

    Sixty Poems By Charles Simic Harcourt, 99 pp., paperback, $12 That Little Something By Charles Simic Harcourt, 73 pp., $23 The Ghost Soldiers By James Tate Ecco, 217 pp., $22.95 God Particles By Thomas Lux Houghton Mifflin, 63 pp., $22 Whenever you hear the word "surreal" these days, it's more than likely to come out of the mouth of a ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Distilling decades into fiction

    With "The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's Century" (Norton, $23.95), her outstanding first fiction collection, poet Alice Fulton reveals herself to be triumphantly at home in the short story. Spanning the 20th century - from a farm birth in 1908 to an MRI in 1999 - Fulton's stories are sublime distillations, not only of the individual lives they ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Present at the creation

    The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation By Nancy Rubin Stuart Beacon, 315 pp., $28.95 The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson By Kevin J. Hayes Oxford University, 752 pp., illustrated, $34.95 Amid the ongoing debate about the Founding Fathers - Is John Adams still ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Lazarus Project By Aleksandar Hemon Two narratives 100 years apart trace the disillusion and dislocation of the immigrant experience (Riverhead, $24.95). The Secret Scripture By Sebastian Barry In Ireland past and present, a doctor and patient plumb the depths of their souls (Viking, $24.95). The Last Fish Tale By Mark Kurlansky Viewed through the prism of Gloucester's past, a ... (Boston Globe, 6/29/08)

  • Hip-hop, the era

    All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America By John McWhorter Gotham, 186 pp., $20 (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Last Fish Tale By Mark Kurlansky Viewed through the prism of Gloucester's past, a survey of new pressures on the city's 400-year-old fishing heritage (Ballantine, $35). (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • A fictional photographer, back in focus

    Happy Trails To You: Stories By Julie Hecht Simon & Schuster, 209 pp., $24 Julie Hecht's fiction is narrated by an unnamed female photographer, married but childless, who approaches middle age with a psychic dread that extends beyond herself and out into the world. Readers were introduced to her in Hecht's much-lauded debut collection, "Do the Windows Open?" and then ... (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • Short Takes

    The Sister By Poppy Adams Knopf, 273 pp., $23.95 Ginny, the unreliable narrator at the center of this splendid first novel, seems at first merely fussy, shy of strangers, and unused to change. But gradually and subtly she begins to appear more severely limited in her abilities and perceptions. (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Top writers' previews Three widely acclaimed writers with novels coming out this fall will offer previews at upcoming readings in Chestnut Hill. (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • The quiet man

    The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate By James Rosen Doubleday. 609 pp., illustrated, $35 (Globe Staff, 6/22/08)

  • After slavery, new system recreates old torments

    Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II By Douglas A. Blackmon Doubleday, 468 pp., illustrated, $29.95 (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • Novel retraces the immigrant experience, then and now

    The Lazarus Project By Aleksandar Hemon Riverhead, 294 pp., illustrated, $24.95 The late, great writer and World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was captured by the Germans and confined to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden. When an American air raid destroyed the city, he was put to work carrying civilians' corpses. The apocalypse haunted Vonnegut ever after. "Believe me," ... (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • US schools also employed salute

    In reference to your review of "The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture" (Sunday Books, June 15), I wonder how many people realize that, until World War II, I recall every day saluting the American flag just like the Germans did in our grammar school, arms straight out, slightly elevated. (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Margot Livesey ("The House on Fortune Street") and DeWitt Henry ("Safe Suicide") read at 2 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

  • In faraway places, dark entanglements

    The Outlander By Gil Adamson Ecco, 389 pp., $25.95 Exiles By Ron Hansen Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 227 pp., $23 Days of Atonement By Michael Gregorio Thomas Dunne, 368 pp., $24.95 To my alien ears, certain American words fairly hum with romance. "Ridge" is one of them. "Lonesome" is another. Their Anglo equivalents - hill, lonely - convey none of the ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • The dark colors in a ruined tapestry

    Playwright, novelist, and poet Sebastian Barry returns repeatedly in his work to Ireland's turbulent decades during World War I and its aftermath and to his family's history. "The Secret Scripture" is his exquisite testament to Roseanne, an old forgotten woman in a Roscommon mental hospital who begins secretly to write her story, and of her doctor, who uncovers a very ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Twice-told tales

    The Secret Scripture By Sebastian Barry Viking, 300 pp., $24.95 Several angels are described in the course of Sebastian Barry's new novel, "The Secret Scripture," but the one that was most vivid to me, although never expressly mentioned, was Walter Benjamin's angel of history. I heard its dark wings flapping, felt its despairing presence, as Barry once again returns, as ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Fathers who think they know it all

    Today, according to my calculations, is the 100th anniversary of Father's Day in the United States. For decades this has meant neckties and golf balls; now it means dainty electronics and sultry perfumes. In any case, the celebration has long struck me as being somehow unmanly or, rather, unmanning. Making a big fuss about Dad and acting like he's this ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Short Takes

    The Tempest Tales By Walter Mosley Black Classic, 190 pp., $19.95 The trickster figure is a fixture in African-American folktales. We recognize his descendant, Tempest Landry, a man with a world of outsmarting to accomplish, in this urban fable, a piquant departure for Walter Mosley. (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Last Fish Tale By Mark Kurlansky Viewed through the prism of Gloucester's past, a survey of new pressures on the city's 400-year-old fishing heritage (Ballantine, $35). The Garden of Last Days By Andre Dubus III An incandescent and absorbing novel about three lives that intersect at a Florida strip club (Norton, $24.95). Note by Note: A Celebration of the ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Division Street

    The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart By Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing Houghton Mifflin, 370 pp., illustrated, $25 More than three decades ago, political theorist Robert Dahl reminded Americans that a "pattern of cleavages" - by race, faith, geography, and class - had been a source of stability for the United States. ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Shelf Life

    New leaders at Leapfrog In recent weeks, New York-based publishing giants HarperCollins and Random House have named new CEOs. Closer to home, Leapfrog Press has undergone big changes, too. (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • The triumph of the 'heil'

    The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture By Tilman Allert. Translated from German by Jefferson Chase Metropolitan, 115 pp., illustrated, $20 As the twig is bent, so bends the bough. For the Nazis it was important to educate little children in performing the supreme gesture of submission to Adolf Hitler's "Thousand-Year Reich." (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Beyond Words

    Reuters: Our World Now Thames & Hudson, 360 pp., paperback, $24.95 Work: The World in Photographs By Ferdinand Protzman National Geographic, 349 pp., $16.95 Views from two new photo books that share a global focus: Above, from Reuters's documentation of 2007's most memorable events, a zebra charges at Kenya Wildlife Service rangers during a monthlong exercise to move about 2,000 ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY : No listings TOMORROW : Poet Maxine Kumin and fiction writer Matthew Klam read at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown (suggested donation, $5). (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Amid the losses of war, unlikely alliances bloom

    Skeletons At The Feast By Chris Bohjalian Shaye Areheart, 372 pp., $25 In this, his 11th novel, Chris Bohjalian is drawn to the atrocities of World War II and has written a poignant account of the conflict's last year, when not only Jews, but also Germans, were fleeing west to escape the oncoming Russian Army. Inspired by a diary kept ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Free range for imagination

    Not a Stick By Antoinette Portis HarperCollins, 32 pp., up to age 7, $12.99 Chicken Feathers By Joy Cowley Illustrated by David Elliot Philomel Books, 160 pp., ages 7 and up, $15.99 "Not a Stick" by Antoinette Portis celebrates the great talent of childhood - the gift of unfettered imagination. Fans of her picture book for very young readers, "Not ... (Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

  • Edging toward the inferno of war

    Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 By Walter A. McDougall Harper, 787 pp., illustrated, $34.95 (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Mysteries in New England

    1. "In the Woods," by Tana French (Penguin, paperback) 2. "Careless in Red," by Elizabeth George (Harper, hardcover) (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Private screenings

    The Film Club By David Gilmour Twelve, 225 pp., $21.99 In "The Film Club," the Canadian author and occasional movie critic David Gilmour commemorates the three years he spent mostly out of work sitting on a sofa watching films with his high-school-dropout son. Some might call this sloth. Gilmour prefers to call it parenting. (Globe Staff, 6/8/08)

  • Short Takes

    The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir By Sarah Manguso Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 184 pp., $22 (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Colony on the Cape The late Norman Mailer wrote many of his major works in Provincetown. After being discharged from the US Army, he holed up on the Cape in 1946 to begin "The Naked and the Dead," the war novel that put him on the map. He continually returned to Provincetown to write, becoming a year-round resident in 1990. (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Garden of Last Days By Andre Dubus III An incandescent and absorbing novel about three lives that intersect at a Florida strip club (Norton, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Sea change

    In "The Last Fish Tale," Mark Kurlansky strikes a poignant chord from the get-go. "Symbolic acts endure and traditions live on when the metaphor is exactly right. That is the principal explanation for why, on the last weekend of every June, dozens of Gloucester men take a boat out to an offshore platform and walk a forty-foot pole covered with a thick, gloppy cushion of grease, try to grab the flag at the end; and whether they succeed or fail, fall a dangerous two or three stories, depending on the tide, to the frigid June sea below. (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poet Mary Jo Salter reads at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Zachary Schomburg and other poets read at 6 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline. . . . Karen Day and Mary Jane Beaufrand speak at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • First-row seats at the celebrity circus

    These three first novels make use of their authors' experiences in interesting, and quite different, ways. (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Prescription for disaster: drugs, lies, and greed

    Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs By Melody Petersen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 432 pp., $26 (Boston Globe, 6/8/08)

  • Magical spielism

    The Enchantress of Florence By Salman Rushdie Random House, 355 pp., $26 The novelist John Gardner claimed there are two basic plots in fiction: someone goes on a trip, or a stranger comes to town. Salman Rushdie's "Enchantress of Florence" opens with a stranger coming to town, and ends with the same fellow heading off on a trip. (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • A Bonding experience

    Ian Fleming would have been 100 years old last Wednesday if he hadn't died at age 56 thanks to a surfeit of the good things in life, namely alcohol, tobacco, and bearnaise sauce. But then, as Ben Macintyre notes in his marvelous tribute, "For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond" (Bloomsbury, $34.99), this was a man who was ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Shelf Life

    The glory of Gorey Just inside the house of the late Edward Gorey, a doll's feet are sticking out from under a rug. The scene duplicates one from Gorey's "Gashlycrumb Tinies," a rhyming abecedarian that relates the fates of 26 doomed children. In this case, "G is for George, smothered under a rug." (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Olive Kitteridge By Elizabeth Strout A unified series of finely observed tales about the residents of a small town in Maine (Random House, $25). Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson By Tricia Tunstall The rewards of teaching and making music at the keyboard (Simon & Schuster, $24). Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History By Ted ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Short Takes

    Lamentations of the Father: Essays By Ian Frazier Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 194 pp., $22 Ian Frazier is an antidote for the blues, whether riffing ironically on a news item that would dump the rest of us into a funk or pricking what is left of our suburban pieties. A prime example of the latter in this collection of humorous ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Politics, faith, and the occasional corpse

    Donna Leon is best known for her subtle and enduring Commissario Guido Brunetti detective series, set in Venice. The latest installment in that series, "The Girl of His Dreams" (Atlantic Monthly, $24), is Leon's 17th Brunetti outing and one of her finest; a cunning novel of great depth, it opens with the peaceful death of Brunetti's mother but soon introduces ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Baseball without boundaries

    South of the Color Barrier: How Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League Pushed Baseball Toward Racial Integration By John Virtue McFarland, 231 pp., illustrated, paperback, $29.95 Of the summer of 1942, during which he played professional baseball in Mexico, Monte Irvin said, "It was the first time in my life I felt that I was free." (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • About-face for a better future

    If I'd Known Then: Women in Their 20s and 30s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves Edited by Ellyn Spragins Da Capo, 192 pp., $18 Your Personal Renaissance: 12 Steps to Finding Your Life's True Calling By Diane Dreher Da Capo, 288 pp., paperback, $15.95 What Would Audrey Do?: Timeless Lessons for Living With Grace and Style By Pamela Keogh ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Hope and humor, in unusual places

    The Last Lecture By Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow Hyperion Audiobooks, unabridged nonfiction, four CDs, four hours and 30 minutes, $21.95, read by Erik Singer; also available as a download from audible.com, $10.46 Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex By Mary Roach Brilliance Audio, unabridged nonfiction, eight CDs, 10 hours, $34.95, read by Sandra Burr; also available on ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • The wanderers

    The Garden of Last Days By Andre Dubus III Norton, 537 pp., $24.95 April's doing all right for herself. She's a single mom, making $10,000 a month dancing and otherwise entertaining customers at the Puma Club for Men in Sarasota, Fla. She's got a cozy little flat near the bay and a built-in babysitter for her 3-year-old daughter in her ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: George Daughan discusses "If by Sea," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Peter Clenott reads from "Hunting the King," at 1 p.m., and Linda Melvern discusses "Conspiracy to Murder," at 6 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Globalization, its discontents, and its upside

    The Post-American World By Fareed Zakaria Norton, 292 pp., $25.95 The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage By Alexandra Harney Penguin, 336 pp., $25.95 With the war in Iraq more than five years old, America's domestic economy in upheaval, a presidential election looming, and uncertainty abounding, this is a good time for a moment of national reflection, ... (Boston Globe, 6/1/08)

  • Anger and personal baggage fill humorous flight of fancy

    They bully us, overcharge us, then ask us to hold, please, for 40 minutes just to lodge our complaints. Americans spend so much time in this robotic consumer purgatory, it's a wonder novelists haven't spied a story here. But Jonathan Miles has been paying attention. In his hilarious debut novel, "Dear American Airlines," Benny Ford, a 53-year-old recovering alcoholic and ... (Boston Globe, 5/29/08)

  • Opening act

    The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938-1940 By Will Swift Smithsonian, 374 pp., illustrated, $26.95 Though it is considered by the forthcoming official biographer of Joseph P. Kennedy, David Nasaw, to be a "thoroughly revisionist" history, Will Swift's "The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938-1940" is actually more derivative than ... (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • Emotions are raw and real in 'Olive Kitteridge'

    Olive Kitteridge By Elizabeth Strout Random House, 270 pp., $25 Elizabeth Strout's new book, "Olive Kitteridge," is chock-full of those moments that make you need to close the page on your finger and look up, in order to absorb the power and poignancy of what you've just read. There's the title character lying on her son's bed after his outdoor ... (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • Bookings

    TOMORROW: Poets Franz Wright and C. D. Wright read at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline. (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Victories at sea Alex Kershaw, a British writer living in Williamstown, is devoted to chronicling the human dramas of World War II. His fourth book on the subject, "Escape From the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew" (Da Capo), chronicles the sinking of a US submarine that sank more ships in the war than ... (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • Rhyme with reason

    Puppies and Piggies Written by Cynthia Rylant Illustrated by Ivan Bates Harcourt, 32 pp., ages 4-8, $16 Imaginary Menagerie:A Book of Curious Creatures Written by Julie Larios Illustrated by Julie Paschkis Harcourt, 32 pp., ages 4-8, $16 Oodles of Animals By Lois Ehlert Harcourt, 56 pp., ages 4-8, $17 The World's Greatest: Poems Written by J. Patrick Lewis Illustrated by ... (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • Chasing white rabbits, and long-lost truths

    Island of Lost Girls By Jennifer McMahon Harper, 272 pp., paperback, $13.95 Judgment Day By Sheldon Siegel MacAdam/Cage, 360 pp., $26 Head Wounds By Chris Knopf Permanent, 272 pp., $28 (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson By Tricia Tunstall The rewards of teaching and making music at the keyboard (Simon & Schuster, $24). (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • Short Takes

    Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness) By Arianna Huffington Knopf, 388 pp., $24.95 Arianna Huffington is angry and, as her subtitle suggests, she has a lot to say about it. A former Republican supporter, she blasts away with ... (Boston Globe, 5/25/08)

  • The Penderwicks ride again

    The Penderwicks on Gardam Street By Jeanne Birdsall Knopf, 320 pp., ages 8-14, $15.99 What's Up, Duck?: A Book of Opposites By Tad Hills Schwartz & Wade, 22 pp., babies and toddlers, $6.99 Trouble By Gary D. Schmidt Clarion, 304 pp., ages 13 and up, $16 Every author takes a risk when she moves her characters from one location to ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History By Ted Sorensen A memoir from JFK's closest adviser that reveals the intimacy, drama, and humor of the two men's years together (Harper, $27.95). The Resurrectionist By Jack O'Connell A mad scientist, a boy in a coma, and a group of circus freaks form the cast of this genre-blending tale (Algonquin Books ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Double vision

    J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography By Rick Geary Hill & Wang, 102 pp., $16.95 (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Leisureville: no place like home

    Andrew Blechman had never thought about retirement living until the energetic couple across the road sold out and moved to the Villages in Florida, the world's largest gated retirement community. When Blechman visited his former neighbors, he entered a surreal world of golf cart parades, Disney-like wholesomeness, pharmaceutical-enhanced sex, drugs, and classic rock. "Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias" (Atlantic ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • First blood

    1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War By Benny Morris Yale University, 524 pp., illustrated, $32.50 When it comes to interpreting the history they shared in 1947-49, Arabs and Israelis subscribe to two radically different narratives. Arabs, and especially Palestinians, remember that period as "The Catastrophe." Israelis have enshrined the same period as their war of independence. One of ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • The fight to unravel those apron strings

    Of Men and Their Mothers By Mameve Medwed Morrow, 289 pp., $24.95 There's sugar and spice and everything nice. And then there's Ina Pollock. (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • New Thinking

    Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions By Dan Ariely 280 pp., $25.95 Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Yale University, 293 pp., illustrated, $26 Near the beginning of "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), Vance Packard quoted from Advertising Age magazine the first principle of the new science of ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Scaling heights, together

    Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson By Tricia Tunstall Simon & Schuster, 214 pp., $24 During my student years and into my first years as a teacher, I was a piano tuner in Western Massachusetts, a job that got me onto various musical stages and into many homes, where I often tuned pianos used by kids taking ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poets Afaa Michael Weaver, Bob Clawson, and Carolyn Hunter read at 3 p.m., at the Concord Poetry Center, 40 Stow St., Concord ($6). . . . Karen Day discusses "No Cream Puffs," at 2 p.m., at Wellesley Booksmith, 82 Central St., Wellesley. (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Things not so good in Norwegian woods

    For months people I know and respect have been telling me I would like Per Petterson's prize-winning "Out Stealing Horses" and I kept asking "Is it funny?" and they kept saying, "No, the author is Norwegian." So if the book hadn't come unbidden into the house in its recently published paperback form (Picador, $14), I doubt I would ever have ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Shelf Life

    A lucky Lindbergh At 62, Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest child of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is finally coming into her own. (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Short Takes

    Wild Nights! By Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 238 pp., $24.95 This challenging collection - a challenge for the author, that is - lets Joyce Carol Oates display her flair not just as a preeminent fiction writer but as a canny scholar of literature as well. Each of its five short stories requires her to evoke convincingly the stormy psyche and ... (Boston Globe, 5/18/08)

  • Eerie anniversary

    A book signing at Kate's Mystery Books has long been a rite of passage for newly published crime authors. Kate Mattes, who opened the shop 25 years ago on Friday, May 13, is a tireless promoter of local writers. Now it's their time to return the favor. (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The House on Fortune Street By Margot Livesey Each of the portraits of the four principals in Livesey's compelling new novel sheds light on the next (HarperCollins, $24.95). The Plague of Doves By Louise Erdrich In her new novel, set in North Dakota, the award-winning author examines the long reach of the past (Harper, $25.95). Unaccustomed Earth By Jhumpa Lahiri ... (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • D.C. confidential

    Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History By Ted Sorensen Harper, 556 pp., illustrated, $27.95 When Ted Sorensen first heard the news on Nov. 22, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy had been shot, he fell into a state of zombie-like mourning. Struggling to control his emotions, he rushed to the Fish Room - the lounge across from the ... (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Echoes of the maternal

    Things I Want My Daughters to Know By Elizabeth Noble Morrow, 374 pp., $22.95 Fear and Yoga in New Jersey By Debra Galant St. Martin's, 256 pp., $23.95 Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige By Kathleen Gilles Seidel St. Martin's, 278 pp., $22.95 Women in Hats By Judy Sheehan Ballantine, 336 pp., paperback, $14 (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Short Takes

    Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China By Fuchsia Dunlop Norton, 320 pp., illustrated, $24.95 The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s wiped out inventive cooking in China. But by the '90s, the boring, sexless uniformity of Chinese communism was over, and China's extraordinary and ancient cuisine was allowed to flourish. (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Henry Winkler discusses "The Life of Me," at 5:30 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. . . . Chris Bohjalian reads from "Skeletons at the Feast," at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Mameve Medwed reads from "Of Men and Their Mothers," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 ... (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Nothing can stop it - the blog!

    Blogging Heroes: Interviews With 30 of the World's Top Bloggers Edited by Michael A. Banks Wiley, 298 pp., illustrated, $24.99 (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Juggling genres, plots, assorted organs

    The Resurrectionist By Jack O'Connell Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 304 pp., $24.95 A writer with a growing cult of fans, Worcester's Jack O'Connell has set all four of his previous books in the same decaying fictional city of Quinsigamond, Mass., and combined a variety of genre elements - noir thriller, science fiction, adventure, horror, and fantasy. His latest is ... (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Nixon: the one

    Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America By Rick Perlstein Scribner, 881 pp., illustrated, $37.50 In August 1970, eager aides pressed into President Nixon's hands "The Real Majority," a political manual by two disaffected Democrats, Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg. The crucial swing voter, the book asserted, the key to assembling a winning coalition, was a ... (Boston Globe, 5/11/08)

  • Rake in the florins, the Medici way!

    I have decided to ignore our crashing economy, exploding debt, and the withering away of the dollar, fascinating though it all is, and have turned my attention to 15th-century Florence and the financial legerdemain of the Medicis. My guide has been Tim Parks's lucid and witty "Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence" (Atlas, $13.95). I had been ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Sins of the father, tepidly told

    A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father By Augusten Burroughs St. Martin's, 242 pp., $24.95 In his wonderful book of essays, "Burning Down the House," Charles Baxter laments the proliferation of "dysfunctional narratives," in which events take place but no one bears responsibility for them. Victim literature, Baxter calls it. Or, to quote Richard Nixon, "Mistakes were ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Fate accompli

    The House on Fortune Street By Margot Livesey HarperCollins, 311 pp., $24.95 The late novelist Iris Murdoch said that literature was meant "to be grasped by enjoyment," a notion that certainly applies to the work of the wonderfully mutable Margot Livesey and her newest novel, "The House on Fortune Street." It is a story about sadness, about our desperate deceptions ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Baseball as a fight for the Finnish

    Sort of Gone: Poems By Sarah Freligh Turning Point, 88 pp., paperback, $17 Anatomy of Baseball Edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner Southern Methodist University, 210 pp., $22.50 The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made It to the Big Leagues After Eleven Years in the Minors By Chris Coste Ballantine, 224 pp., illustrated, $25 The Best Sports Writing of ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Kinder, gentler campaigns Katherine Adam analyzed the presidential race for her honors thesis at Boston College last year. Now it's been published as "The New Feminized Majority: How Democrats Can Change America With Women's Values" (Paradigm). Her co-author is BC sociologist Charles Derber. (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Language and conflict

    Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of "Romantic Imperialism" and "William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s." His latest book, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation" (Norton, $24.95), is a lucid, invaluable chronicle of Palestinian daily life in the occupied territories. Makdisi, who alternates firsthand accounts with reports and interviews involving ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Short Takes

    Split By Suzanne Finnamore Dutton, 272 pp., $24.95 Having marched us through a sassy semifictional account of her pregnancy in "The Zygote Chronicles," in "Split" Suzanne Finnamore files a dispatch from the next, less cheerful stop on the grand tour of life: the implosion of her marriage to a husband whose philanderings had been sensed but never acknowledged, like a ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Dissatisfied with congress? Scientists try to help.

    Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex By Mary Roach Norton, 319 pp., illustrated, $24.95 You want to love a book called "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," especially because its author is Mary Roach, who has already proven herself on the topic of death in bestsellers "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" and "Spook: Science ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • History rechanneled

    A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World By Tony Horwitz Holt, 445 pp., illustrated, $27.50 Near the end of "A Voyage Long and Strange," Tony Horwitz's latest mix of historical research and modern-day road trip, one of the people he spends time with says, "Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Jack O'Connell and Perrin Ireland read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Hillary Jordan reads from "Mudbound," at 4 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. . . . . (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Plague of Doves By Louise Erdrich In her new novel, set in North Dakota, the award-winning author examines the long reach of the past (Harper, $25.95). A Summer of Hummingbirds By Christopher Benfey The hummingbird as muse for 19th-century artists is the subject of this deftly written sequence of intertwined vignettes (Penguin, $25.95). Terror and Consent: The Wars for ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • An early end; dating the undead

    Before I Die By Jenny Downham Listening Library, unabridged fiction, six CDs, seven hours, $34, read by Charlotte Parry; also available as a download from audible.com, $23.95. (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)

  • New & Recommended

    A Summer of Hummingbirds By Christopher Benfey The hummingbird as muse for 19th-century artists is the subject of this deftly written sequence of intertwined vignettes (Penguin, $25.95). (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • When intellectuals strode the earth (or at least New York)

    Ah, the business of being an intellectual. You go around publishing books, giving lectures - always under the impression that ideas matter, that a democracy without a free-market debate of opinions would be less humane, and that the vigorous life of the mind is worth living. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Senator Chuck Hagel discusses "America," at 3 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. . . . Young-adult author Marissa Doyle and children's author M. P. Barker speak at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • Celluloid city

    Boston has long had a bumpy ride with Hollywood. From time to time, the city's Puritanism, unions, and bureaucrats have thwarted directors who wanted to film here. Currently the city has a rosy relationship with filmmakers, but critic Paul Sherman has been around long enough to expect that the good times won't last. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • At a distance

    "All my life I've had to think about different ways of looking," V.S. Naipaul tells us at the start of yet another footsore stage (the 29th, including novels, essays, memoirs, and ruminations) in his lifelong trek to locate an estranged self in an estranging world. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • A house called Wit's End is only the beginning

    Wit’s End By Karen Joy Fowler Putnam, 324 pp., $24.95 Delusion By Peter Abrahams Morrow, 297 pp., $24.95 (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • Terror and its reverberations

    In "The Second Plane," a collection of newspaper and magazine pieces, Martin Amis remarks on the awkwardness of novelists - summoned by editors to do a stylish turn on the World Trade Center attack - as they try to locate a journalistic muscle inside themselves. ("Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Alexander Pope wondered. Here the butterfly was asked to turn one.) (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • Short Takes

    This excellent history of madness in women - its definition, diagnosis, and treatment - begins with erotic descriptions of religious ecstasies and demonic possessions; proceeds through the introduction of asylums for the insane, the treatment of nerves and hysteria, the fashion for hypnosis, the glamour of psychoanalysis, the trends in eating disorders; and concludes with our present infatuation with the quick fix of psychopharmacology. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • Balancing act

    You could read Louise Erdrich's latest book for its wisdom. The author of 11 previous novels - including the award-winning "Love Medicine" - Erdrich writes from a philosophical, cultural, and historical perspective that is rich and deeply rewarding. Or you could read "The Plague of Doves" for its poetry. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)

  • Intersecting lives, touched by an angel

    The Third Angel By Alice Hoffman Shaye Areheart, 278 pp., $25 The success of any novel, E. M. Forster maintained, rests on the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says. In "The Third Angel," as in many of her previous 24 novels, Alice Hoffman sets herself a difficult task. Its menagerie of characters includes ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century By Philip Bobbitt A complex analysis of the war on terror from the author of "The Shield of Achilles" (Knopf, $35). Unaccustomed Earth By Jhumpa Lahiri In her latest story collection, the author mines the dislocations of the immigrant experience. (Knopf, $25). Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories By Tobias ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Case closed?

    The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy By David Kaiser Harvard University, 509 pp., illustrated, $35 As a professional historian with about 40 years' experience, David Kaiser is proud of his ability to locate and interpret evidence. That experience is a major reason Harvard University Press decided to enter the John F. Kennedy assassination book merry-go-round, now ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Flights of fancy

    A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade By Christopher Benfey Penguin, 287 pp., illustrated, $25.95 Strange as it may seem, during the decades spanning 1862 to 1882 especially, the hummingbird became a notable American icon, particularly among a tangled cluster of New England-based ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • The Celtic tiger and its carnage

    I have discovered a brand-new way of bringing my blood to a boil. I can do it in one second flat by simply clicking on http://www.greystonesharbour.ie:80/ and looking at the "artist's impression" of the harbor project in Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland. This modest little haven (and scene of my youth) is set to be transformed into a place of stunning, ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Melissa Stewart and Sarah Brannen speak at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Jeffrey Brown signs "The Competitive Edge," from 1 to 2 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Prudential Center. (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Green man Henry David Thoreau was a minor writer when he died. Today the man recognized as the nation's first environmentalist is a favorite of publishers, especially around Earth Day. (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Short Takes

    Dictation: A Quartet By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 179 pp., $24 Such delicious mischief. Set in and around the London of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the title story in this collection stages an early skirmish in the class and gender wars that would roil the upcoming century. (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Giving peace, trees a chance

    Why War Is Never a Good Idea Written by Alice Walker, Illustrated by Stefano Vitale HarperCollins, 32 pp., ages 7 and up, $16.99 Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai By Claire A. Nivola Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., ages 5-10, $16.95 How I Learned Geography By Uri Shulevitz Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., ages ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Historical Novels

    Scottsboro By Ellen Feldman Norton, 384 pp., $24.95 Fall of Frost By Brian Hall Viking, 340 pp., $25.95 The Dark Lantern By Gerri Brightwell Crown, 321 pp., $24.95 At this time of year, it is natural to feel a little optimistic. Lumps of defeated snow have retreated to the deep woods, green shoots appear, and pale human limbs get their ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Present at the pandemic

    Journalist and historian Misha Glenny reported on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s for the BBC and is the author of "The Rebirth of History," "The Fall of Yugoslavia," and "The Balkans." His chilling new book, "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld," charts the rise and proliferation of the new brand of organized crime, largely spawned by the ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • Banging the drum loudly

    Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance By Michael Holley HarperCollins, 207 pp.,illustrated, $25.95 (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)

  • The holes in the war on terror

    Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century By Philip Bobbitt Knopf, 672 pp., $35 Philip Bobbitt has been thinking broadly, deeply and innovatively about war for a long time. Six years ago, he published a massive book called "The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History." More than one reviewer called the book magisterial. Summarizing ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • The chimp who tried to talk

    Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human By Elizabeth Hess Bantam, 369 pp., illustrated, $23 The title and early pages of "Nim Chimpsky" suggest that it will be a biography of the chimpanzee who was the subject of a 1970s language study designed to show that chimpanzees are even more human than our 98.7 percent-shared DNA suggests. Ultimately, "Nim ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Prolific and popular poet Mary Oliver celebrates the creatures she observes on Cape Cod in "Red Bird" (Beacon), her 17th book of poetry. A longtime resident of Provincetown, Oliver, at 72, is among the nation's most popular poets. (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • And so it went

    Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace By Kurt Vonnegut Putnam, 232 pp., illustrated, $24.95 "Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. . . . His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville and Twain." So begins the moving and illuminating introduction to this posthumous collection of Kurt ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Poet Mary Jo Salter reads at 3 p.m. at the Concord Free Library, 129 Main St., Concord. . . . Phuli Cohan discusses "The Natural Hormone Makeover" at 2 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • Short Takes

    Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood By Robyn Scott Penguin, 464 pp., $24.95 "Living on the fringe" is how Robyn Scott's mother describes the family's unconventional approach to marriage, child-rearing, education, and housekeeping in Botswana. Mrs. Scott, an advocate of home-schooling, believed that work and play should be indistinguishable, that routine ruined creativity and television ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • Star struck

    Maria Mitchell and The Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics By Renée Bergland Beacon, 300 pp., $29.95 Most Bostonians remember the tempest in 2005 when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, suggested that the scarcity of women scientists might be due to their innate lack of aptitude for the subject. Reports, studies, and editorials poured forth ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Unaccustomed Earth By Jhumpa Lahiri In her latest story collection, she mines the dislocations of the immigrant experience. (Knopf, $25). (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • From beach house to restaurant to art studio

    Wit's End By Karen Joy Fowler Putnam, 336 pp., $24.95 Turning Tables By Heather and Rose MacDowell Dial Press, 324 pp., $24 The Forgery of Venus By Michael Gruber Morrow, 336 pp., $24.95 April brings a delightful and eccentric new tale from a best-selling author, a scathingly funny first novel set in a high-end restaurant, and an unusual psychological thriller ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)

  • Not doing the right thing

    The modern conservative movement in America began to emerge alongside the baby boomers in the early 1950s, with the publication of William Buckley's "God and Man at Yale," Whittaker Chambers's "Witness," Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind," and the founding of The National Review (again by Buckley). (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Ann Harleman and Ed Hardy speak at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Sarah Brannen and Melissa Stewart discuss "Uncle Bobby's Wedding" and "When Rain Falls," at 4 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Of elves and men

    Dreamsongs, Vols. 1-3 By George R. R. Martin Random House Audio , unabridged selections, various prices, various readers, introductions read by the author; also available as varied downloads from www.audible.com. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Catching Frost's cadence

    Brian Hall's 2003 novel, "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company," re-imagined not only the Lewis and Clark expedition but also the inner lives of its participants, Anglo and Native American. "Fall of Frost" (Viking, $25.95) penetrates even deeper, this time into the life of Robert Frost, which unfolds as a graceful, mesmerizing switchback from the poet's 1962 visit ... (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Out of place

    "He had so little to do with India," a character named Kaushik muses near the end of "Going Ashore," the final story in Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection. "He had not gone back since the year his mother died, had never gone there for work. As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant. And yet, in Rome, in all of Europe, he was always regarded as an Indian first." (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Baseball before steroids, arbitration, and charter jets

    It is well known that baseball fans suffer from overbearing nostalgia, a condition that grows more aggressive with age, which is to say as the world deteriorates from that state of sun-dappled perfection that marked our youth. Gone, we lament, are the days when World Series games were played on crisp fall afternoons, not in the middle of an arctic ... (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Reframed

    For Herald American news photographer Stanley Forman, April 5, 1976, began as just another day. The news in Boston, as it had been for months, involved protests over court-ordered school desegregation. On assignment, Forman headed to City Hall Plaza, where high school students from South Boston were gathering for another demonstration. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Shelf life

    Light housekeeping For 14 years, nature photographer Thomas Mark Szelog and his wife, Lee Ann Szelog, lived next to the Marshall Point lighthouse in Port Clyde, Maine. They watched porpoises and harbor seals, witnessed baptisms and weddings at the water's edge, took care of the lighthouse, and produced a book. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • The top 5 baseball books in New England

    1. "Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance," by Michael Holley (HarperCollins, hardcover) (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Short takes

    Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • The rifts and rhythms of a vanished Southie

    It's 1974, and the sometimes volatile busing of black students into South Boston (and white students out of South Boston) is in full throttle. In a state of barely contained terror, Ann Ahern, a white 16-year-old from Southie, is riding the afternoon black bus with a black classmate, Rochelle, out of Southie and through Roxbury. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)

  • Free fall

    Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories By Tobias Wolff Knopf, 379 pp., $26.95 In choosing 21 stories from his three collections along with 10 published since, Tobias Wolff tells us that he felt free to improve them. It is unusual among writers and artists, who generally hold to the notion of the finished work. It's not unknown, though; Henry ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Movers and sheikhs

    The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century By Steve Coll Penguin, 671 pp., illustrated, $35 One of the many conspiracy theories surrounding Sept. 11, 2001, is some inchoate suspicion about the request the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., made to fly out Saudi citizens and members of the Bin Laden family in the days after the attack. ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • New & Recommended

    The Rain Before It Falls By Jonathan Coe In a tense and affecting work, Coe presents a dying woman's account of her tangled life (Knopf, $23.95). A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut novel intimately explores political and religious conflicts (Harper, $24.95). Lush Life By Richard Price A wry portrait of ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Sifting through a surfeit of clues

    Friend of the Devil By Peter Robinson Morrow, 384 pp., $24.95 An Incomplete Revenge By Jacqueline Winspear Holt, 306 pp., $24 Judas Horse By April Smith Knopf, 318 pp., $23.95 "She might have been staring out to sea." Yorkshire-born Peter Robinson's "Friend of the Devil" begins with the haunting image of a woman in a wheelchair, sitting perched at the ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: The annual PEN Hemingway Awards take place at 3 p.m., at the JFK Library, Columbia Point, with keynote speaker Alice Hoffman; for registration information, call 617-514-1643. . . . Elisa Albert and Eric Lerner read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Harry Groome reads from "Wing Walking," at 3 p.m., at Concord ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Portrait of Stegner, slightly skewed

    Wallace Stegner and the American West By Philip L. Fradkin Knopf, 369 pp., illustrated, $27.50 Though he was born in Iowa in 1909 and raised primarily in Saskatchewan and Salt Lake City, though he lived for long periods in the Midwest and Northeast and was buried in Vermont in 1993, Wallace Stegner is strongly identified with the West. (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Compleat angler

    A dozen years ago, Charlie Moore was a failed businessman. Today he's known as the Mad Fisherman to the 1.5 million viewers a week who watch "Charlie Moore Outdoors" on NESN and "Beat Charlie Moore" on ESPN2. (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Short Takes

    A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life By Andrew Krivak Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 324 pp., $25 It is impossible not to like Andrew Krivak. He is honest and earnest, even-tempered and open-hearted. In measured tone and voice, he chronicles his eight years of restless searching. After growing up in a large Catholic family in Pennsylvania mining country, ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • How down have we dumbed?

    The Age of American Unreason By Susan Jacoby Pantheon, 356 pp., $26 Recently added to the list of impending dooms - global warming, a retro-1930s economy, seven more months of sleeping children in campaign ads - come stern warnings from The New Yorker and The New Republic on the death of the printed word. Be it newspapers, magazines, or an ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)

  • Bookings

    MONDAY: Poet Linda Pastan reads from "Queen of a Rainy Country" and novelist Rachel Pastan from "Lady of the Snakes" at 8 p.m. at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 56 Brattle St., Cambridge; $3. . . . Samantha Power discusses "Chasing the Flame" at 5:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Library, Dorchester. . . . Joshua Kendall discusses "The Man ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Weaving the waves of talk radio

    Burning Up the Air Jerry Williams, Talk Radio, and the Life in Between By Steve Elman and Alan Tolz Commonwealth Editions, 366 pp., illustrated, $27.95 Golden Wings & Hairy Toes: Encounters With New England's Most Imperiled Wildlife By Todd McLeish University Press of New England, 242 pp., illustrated, $26 Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home By Susan ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • In 'Johnny One-Eye,' reading to experience history

    Johnny One-Eye By Jerome Charyn Norton, 480 pp., $25.95 Gore Vidal once said that any reader who gets his history from historical fiction gets the history he deserves. But smart readers don't read historical fiction for history. They read it for the experience of history. They read it to live the past through the struggles of characters who are thrust ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Beyond Words

    America at Home: A Close-up Look at How We Live By Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt Running Press Book Publishers, 240 pp., $40 The outcome of a national project involving everyone from professional photographers to people with camera phones, "America at Home" is an upbeat collection of portraits looking at how and where people spend their time when they're with ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Wheels within wheels

    The Rain Before It Falls By Jonathan Coe Knopf, 240 pp., $23.95 In Jonathan Coe's "The Closed Circle" (2004) a character asks, ambitiously, "Does narrative serve any function?" His short new novel offers one answer: It serves the function of being necessary to human life. Coe himself might shrink from such an encompassing explanation. At one moment in "The Rain ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • A. J. Liebling goes to war

    A. J. Liebling is best known for writing about the doings of New York's demimonde, the vaudevillians, burlesquers, small-time operators, sports impresarios, athletes, bookies, and sharps, its curious customers in all their hues. He is especially renowned for writing on boxers and on the pleasures of the table. But when France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Short Takes

    The Have-Nots By Katharina Hacker Translated from German by Helen Atkins Europa, 352 pp., paperback, $14.95 The title characters, the have-nots of this unsettling novel, are not its protagonists but rather features of the human landscape in which its more advantaged central characters act out their amorphous crises. (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • The sanctuary of the night

    Morag Joss began writing crime fiction following a playful conversation with author P.D. James. Three "Sara Selkirk" mysteries followed, but it was Joss's superb novel of psychological suspense, "Half Broken Things," that prompted comparisons to both James and Ruth Rendell. "The Night Following" is a further departure, into the mind of a woman unmoored by marital betrayal and that of ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Faith examined

    God in the White House: A History - How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush By Randall Balmer HarperOne, 243 pp., $24.95 The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Church By Philip F. Lawler Encounter Books, 272 pp., $25.95 How Jesus Became Christian By Barrie A. Wilson St. Martin's, 304 pp., $24.95 What ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Lush Life By Richard Price A wry portrait, in novel form, of the tension between New York's low-lifes and hipsters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). Mr. Adams's Last Crusade By Joseph Wheelan John Quincy Adams's 17 post-presidential years in Congress, entertainingly examined (PublicAffairs, $26.95). A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Satisfying tidbits, about food and family

    Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink Edited by David Remnick Books on Tape, unabridged nonfiction, 20 CDs, 25 hours, various readers, $96 from booksontape.com, 1-800-733-3000; also available as a download from audible.com; $45.50 unabridged, $20.97 abridged (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Bending the birth of the blues

    In Search of the Blues By Marybeth Hamilton Basic, 309 pp., illustrated, $24.95 Alongside a railroad track in the Mississippi Delta, two signs commemorate the birth of the blues in the town of Tutwiler. While touring the Delta in 1903, a wooden panel indicates, W. C. Handy heard a musician sing as he pressed a knife along the strings of ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Baseball matters With Opening Day around the corner, publishers are throwing their first pitches for Boston, among them Richard Bradley's "The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78" (Free Press), and Michael Holley's "Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance" (Harper). Coming next week is "Dynasty: The Inside Story of How the ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)

  • Hustle and merlot

    Luxury lofts have replaced flophouses. Haute cuisine has supplanted the soup kitchens. Post-Giuliani, Manhattan's once-edgy Lower East Side seems like a Wi-Fi wonderland, a kind of theme park where, as writer Richard Price has observed, young would-be artists flit between coffee shops, pretending to live in a never-ending production of "Rent." (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Dealing with life in a dying world

    Lydia Millet's sixth novel, "How the Dead Dream," is a quirky, discursive portrait of one man's evolving consciousness about success, love, kinship, and planetary responsibility. In this provocative odyssey, as in her previous novels, Millet mingles the rational, absurd, and supernatural. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • New & Recommended

    Mr. Adams's Last Crusade By Joseph Wheelan John Quincy Adams's 17 post-presidential years in Congress, entertainingly examined (PublicAffairs, $26.95). A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut novel intimately explores political and religious conflicts (Harper, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Stephanie Schorow discusses "The Crime of the Century," at 2 p.m., at Duxbury Public Library, 77 Alden St., Duxbury. . . . Sara Laschever discusses "Ask for It," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Darci Klein discusses "To Full Term," at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • All creatures, great and overrated

    Twenty years ago my high school biology teacher drew a leafless tree of life on the blackboard. At the base of its trunk were single-celled protists, and as the tree extended upward, it forked into the plant and animal kingdoms. The limbs of each kingdom quickly subdivided into phyla: ferns and flatworms, conifers and echinoderms. Toward the top of the tree, a branch was labeled "chordates," and at the very top of that branch's mess of twigs, our teacher labeled the highest shoot "human beings." (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Short Takes

    Last Last Chance By Fiona Maazel Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 337 pp., $25 "Being a drug addict is the hardest job I have ever had," whines Lucy, the 29-year-old narrator of this very smart and very funny novel. When not whining, Lucy boasts, wisecracks, and pokes, prods, and sneers at herself and all those around her - mostly her drug-addicted ... (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Pulp factions

    It was a mild revelation to me, when I had kids, that we would feed them a steady diet of "children's literature," and that with the exception of Daniel Pinkwater's collected works these predigested texts would be so insipid. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Germany's ambivalent ally

    October of 1940, Adolf Hitler and Generalissimo Francisco Franco met at Hendaye, near the French-Spanish border. The purpose was to flesh out Spain's agreement in principle to enter the war on the side of Germany and Italy. The principle was reaffirmed, and it went on being reaffirmed over the next couple of years. The flesh, for the most part, never did attach. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Eye on the prizes

    A widely lauded, darkly funny novel about a Chicago ad agency during the dot-com bust has won the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction. Patrick Hemingway, son of Ernest, will present the award to Joshua Ferris for "Then We Came to the End" (Little, Brown), at 3 p.m. March 30 at the John F. Kennedy ... (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Harvard creative-writing professor Bret Johnston presents an interactive event at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . . William Cullina discusses "Native Ferns, Moss and Grasses," at 1 p.m., at Garden in the Woods, 180 Hemenway Rd., Framingham. (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Creative colony

    The hills of northwestern Connecticut have long been dotted with the studios and homes of writers and artists. Philip Roth, Frank McCourt, and Honor Moore live in Litchfield County, as did Harriet Beecher Stowe, Madeleine L'Engle, James Thurber, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, and others. Photographs by Miller's late wife Inge Morath - on permanent exhibit at the University of Connecticut ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Innocent but inept, an emigré arouses suspicion

    A Person of Interest By Susan Choi Viking, 356 pp., $24.95 At the start of "A Person of Interest," a package bomb mortally injures Professor Hendley, chairman of the computer department and star of an otherwise mediocre Midwestern university. "Oh, good" is the immediate thought of Professor Lee in the adjoining office, even as the blast knocks him off his ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Forced through celebrity's many circles of hell

    Three Girls and Their Brother By Theresa Rebeck Shaye Areheart, 352 pp., $23.95 Remember Me? By Sophie Kinsella Dial, 400 pp., $25 (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • New & Recommended

    A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut novel intimately explores political, cultural, and religious conflicts (Harper, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Jim dandy

    The Blue Star By Tony Earley Little, Brown, 286 pp., $23.99 When he published his first novel, "Jim the Boy," about a year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass in fictional Aliceville, N.C., Tony Earley told The New York Times that one day he wanted "to see this really fat book that has five or six short stories and ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • An erratic path through the storm

    Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World By Samantha Power Penguin , 622 pp., illustrated, $32.95 (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • It took a village to win a Newbery

    Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! : Voices From a Medieval Village By Laura Amy Schlitz Illustrated by Robert Byrd Candlewick, 84 pp., ages 10 and up, $19.99 (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Bonus Myles

    The once-unimaginable has happened: Flann O'Brien (d. 1966) has found a place in the Everyman's Library - and the event has opened the door to my writing about this incomparable Irish writer again. The snug, cloth-bound, ribbon-embellished volume ($25) contains all four novels written under the pen name Flann O'Brien. It also includes Patrick C. Power's translation of "An Béal ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Short Takes

    Beet By Roger Rosenblatt Ecco, 225 pp., $23.95 The hills and valleys of New England are full of dead ringers for Beet College, the locus in quo of this jokey farce by author and TV commentator Roger Rosenblatt. (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Means and ends

    Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization By Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster, 566 pp., $30 On Dec. 7, 1940, the Air Ministry of Great Britain sent a secret memo to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. One hundred planes, the ministry maintained, could deliver "the most destructive possible bombing attack against a selected German town." After ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • Voices carry, and a writer listens

    Jonathan Coe's dazzling 1995 novel, "The Winshaw Legacy," brilliantly satirized Margaret Thatcher's England and introduced American readers to one of Britain's most perceptive, versatile, and graceful writers. It was followed by "The Rotters' Club" and "The Closed Circle" (completing the political trilogy) and "The House of Sleep." Now in "The Rain Before It Falls" (Knopf, $23.95), Coe tells the story ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)

  • A widow and mother, present at a painful creation

    A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Harper, 276 pp., $24.95 The map featured in Tahmima Anam's "A Golden Age" reveals the curious geography that once defined Pakistan. This volatile nation was created when India was partitioned in 1947, with West Pakistan on one side of India, and East Pakistan, hundreds of miles away, bordering the area around Calcutta. Rehana, the ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • Trunk show

    Jumbo: The Greatest Elephant in the World By Paul Chambers Steerforth, 224 pp., illustrated, $23.95 Anyone associated with Tufts University is well aware of the tale. The humble contents of an old Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar that sits in the office of the university's athletic director represents the remains of one of the 19th century's biggest international celebrities. (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • The flip side of Frost

    The Collected Prose of Robert Frost Edited by Mark Richardson Belknap/Harvard University, 378 pp., $39.95 A year ago "The Notebooks of Robert Frost" appeared, the first of a number of works by Frost to be published by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Now, following on its heels, comes this welcome edition of Frost's prose, 76 items ranging from a paragraph to ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • Turkish delight

    Scholar Jenny White, an anthropology professor at Boston University, brings Turkey's past to life in a new book she characterizes as a "Muslim version of 'The Da Vinci Code.' " (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Jim Leahy reads from "Living in Concord," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • Revved up, knocked out, fed up

    One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation By Liz Clarke Villard, 293 pp., illustrated, $25 Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward By Bob Halloran Lyons, 289 pp., $24.95 Won't Back Down: Teams, Dreams, and Family By Kim Mulkey with Peter May Da Capo, 219 pp., illustrated, $24.95 God Save the Fan: How Preening Sportscasters, Athletes ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • Been there, played that

    Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat By David Amram Paradigm, 321 pp., illustrated, $25.95 David Amram identifies himself as "a full-time composer who is also an improviser, a conductor, a free-association scat singer," but that hardly covers the range of his work. Amram seems to have done everything there is to do in the world of music. He has ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • Short Takes

    Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding By Heather King Viking, 238 pp., $24.95 This memoir deserves to be as popular as Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling "Eat, Pray, Love," although it is not quite as much fun. It is more demanding, but also more rewarding. Its trajectory is more straightforward (from sinner ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)

  • A return to Oz, marred by a wicked killing

    Moonlight Downs , By Adrian Hyland, Soho, 322 pp., $24 Of Blood and Sorrow , By Valerie Wilson Wesley, Ballantine, 222 pp., $25 Unknown Means , By Elizabeth Becka, Hyperion , 324 pp., $22.95 (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Inside the "controlled madness" of creation

    Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories By Steven Millhauser Knopf, 244 pp., $24 "Dangerous Laughter" is Steven Millhauser's best story collection. This baker's dozen sums up everything he has been driving at since the beginning of his writing career. Adolescents sulk, break down, and die. Other characters - artists and ordinary people alike - disappear except for the barest trace, or create ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Vicious cycle

    Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being, By Todd Balf, Crown, 306 pp., illustrated, $24 Nearly a century before Michael Jordan, there was another African-American athlete whose powerful jump dominated a sport and captivated fans worldwide. Only this spectacular superstar did it while remaining very much earthbound. (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Lester Brown discusses "Plan B 3.0," at 7:30 p.m., in Cary Hall, 1605 Mass. Ave., Lexington. (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Shelf Life

    Spree and sympathy The petty criminals who robbed the Brink's garage in Boston's North End nearly 60 years ago are among the city's favorite folk heroes. (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • New & recommended

    Tyrants By Marshall N. Klimasewiski In this impressive story collection, a variety of characters are artfully revealed (Norton, paperback, $14.95). His Illegal Self By Peter Carey Three alluring characters form the center of this novel of exile and identity (Knopf, $24.95). The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead By David Shields Essays about humanity that are ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Surf wars

    Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations By Clay Shirky Penguin, 336 pp., $25.95 Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob By Lee Siegel Spiegel & Grau, 182 pp., $22.95 In the spring of 2006, a computer programmer named Evan Guttman performed a small miracle. He helped a friend retrieve an expensive cellphone ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • A soldier who picked up his pen

    Arkady Babchenko was drafted into the Russian Army in 1995 to fight in the First Chechen War. He was 18. During training, in accordance with tradition, he and his fellow recruits were beaten and tortured by their superiors. Some died. At the front, Babchenko witnessed unimaginable brutality and occasional acts of courage, even humanity. In 1999, he volunteered to fight ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Ingenuity the mother of 'Invention'

    The Invention of Hugo Cabret By Brian Selznick Scholastic, 544 pp., ages 9-12, $22.99 Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story From the Underground Railroad Written by Ellen Levine Illustrated by Kadir Nelson Scholastic, 40 pp., ages 6-9, $16.99 First the Egg By Laura Vaccaro Seeger Roaring Brook, 32 pp., ages 2-6, $14.95 You can count on the librarians. Year after ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Mr. Adams stays in Washington

    Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress By Joseph Wheelan PublicAffairs, 309 pp., illustrated, $26.95 Though many former US presidents have retired from the public eye, not all have been content with quiet pursuits. Thomas Jefferson, among his other accomplishments, founded a university in his home state of Virginia. William Howard Taft, defeated in the ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • Short takes

    Kyra By Carol Gilligan Random House, 241 pp., $25 Kyra and Andreas, both European exiles, traumatized survivors of man's inhumanity to man, have washed ashore in 1980s Cambridge, where they meet and, after Andreas batters down Kyra's considerable emotional defenses, become lovers. Then, abruptly, Andreas leaves, and Kyra falls apart. Since the novel's author is Carol Gilligan, the renowned theorist ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)

  • New & Recommended

    His Illegal Self By Peter Carey Three alluring characters form the center of this novel of exile and identity (Knopf, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • Soul deep

    Certain great art establishes only gradually the kind of wide, deep appeal known as "classic." Such art may be perceived at first as merely popular, like the work of William Shakespeare and Duke Ellington, and eventually acquire critical esteem. Other works may at first appear peculiar and arcane, like those of Vincent van Gogh or Emily Dickinson, and then for later generations come to seem universally, immediately appealing. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • Short Takes

    Most of the stories in this beautiful collection center on two groups of characters: a family (Brian and his parents, Henry and Angela) and a couple (Tanner and Jun Hee). We meet Henry and Angela first, in "The Third House," during their courtship. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • Bookings

    TODAY: Paul and Stephen Kendrick read from "Douglass and Lincoln," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • Immortality can really get old

    Unworshiped, aging, their powers shrinking, the Greek gods have been living poor for the past few centuries in a shabby London neighborhood. Artemis, goddess of the moon, the tides, and the hunt, works as a dog walker. Aphrodite gives phone sex; Apollo stars in a third-rate TV program; Ares, the war god, foments terrorism and small far-off conflicts. Ceres is a gardener, Athena dispenses wisdom in a high academic jargon nobody can understand, and Zeus, quite mad, is locked up in the attic. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • The anatomy of Yeats's inventions

    In her preface to "Our Secret Discipline," Helen Vendler tells us that 50 years ago, as a graduate student at Harvard, she planned to write her dissertation on Yeats's poetry; then on reflection decided that, at age 22, she didn't know enough to write about a poet who kept going until age 73 (she wrote on Yeats's plays instead). (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • Easy rider

    To the honorifics William Vollmann has gathered during his meteoric career, we may now add one more: creator of an entirely new genre. His new book, "Riding Toward Everywhere," is the first recorded example of Transcendental Hoboism. There's no other way to describe this brief and fevered paean to the joys of American nomadism, by way of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • In genteel Vienna, it's coffee with crime

    Here's a little test. The next time the conversation turns to books, say "I'm reading a very good historical novel" and observe the response. An indulgent smile? ("What a dimwit.") An impatient frown? ("Excuse me, we're discussing books here.") Despite the fact that the genre has recently been graced by the likes of Martin Amis, a quaint prejudice persists. Yet "serious" novelists who stoop to historical fiction often disappoint, while a writer such as Frank Tallis shows how irrelevant these distinctions are. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)

  • Domesticated partners

    Everything Amy Sutherland needed to know about improving her marriage she learned at a school for animal trainers. That's the gist of what she wrote in a 2006 "Modern Love" column in The New York Times . It stirred debate - and became the most e-mailed Times article of the year. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
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