Best Nonfiction & Teen Books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews

KIRKUS BEST NONFICTION & TEEN BOOKS OF

2012

REVIEWS SPECIAL ISSUE

THIS ISSUE: 100 BEST NONFICTION & TEEN BOOKS

Also In This Issue

The Top 25 Nonfiction Books of 2012 p. 45

Cheryl Strayed Kirkus Q&A On Her Wild Year p. 18

Photo by Holly Andres for the Oregon Cultural Trust Cheryl Strayed on the Pacific Crest Trail

The Top 25 Teen Books of 2012 p. 86 John Green on the “Intractable Injustice of the Human Condition” p. 50

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Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N

contents nonfiction REVIEWS................................................................ p. 3 Q&A WITH david byrne................................... p. 8 Q&A WITH cheryl strayed............................ p. 18 Top 25 nonFiction Books............................. p. 45

coming soon: Best Indie Books of 2012 and Best iPad Book Apps of 2012—released with Kirkus Reviews’

teen REVIEWS................................................................ p. 47

December 15th issue

# President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com Editor E L A I N E S Z E WC Z Y K eszewczyk@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Children’s & Teen Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Features Editor C laiborne S mith csmith@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E Senior Indie Editor KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com Indie Editor RYA N L E A H E Y rleahey@kirkus.com Indie Editor D avid R a p p drapp@kirkus.com Assistant Indie Editor M AT T D O M I N O mdomino@kirkus.com Editorial Coordinator CHELSEA LANGFORD clangford@kirkus.com Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS Director of Kirkus Editorial P E R RY C RO W E pcrowe@kirkus.com

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This Issue’s Contributors

Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Amy Boaz • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Marnie Colton • Gregory F. DeLaurier • Daniel Dyer • Gro Flatebo • Julie Foster • Sean Gibson • Alan Goldsher • Ian Griffin • BJ Hollars • Robert M. Knight • Angela Leroux-Lindsey • Raina Lipsitz • Joe Maniscalco • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Chris Morris • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • David Rapp • Kristen Bonardi Rapp • William P. Shumaker • Arthur Smith • Wendy Smith • Claire Trazenfeld • Steve Weinberg • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Joan Wilentz

nonfiction Every year in September, I start thinking about the best books of the year, combing through the archives and querying my reviewers, the consummate professionals who assess the merits of the important—and not-so-important—books that are published every year. Like last year, 2012 proved to be a banner year in adult nonfiction. With nearly 200 starred nonfiction reviews to choose from, and nearly as many books that were significant in one way or another, it was exceedingly difficult, as always, to choose the top-100 list. Choosing any “best-of ” list is always a massive undertaking, a task guaranteed to involve plenty of discussion, heated debate and perhaps even controversy—and that’s as it should be. Whether it’s new superlative work from some of the biggest names in nonfiction—Gail Collins, Eric Jay Dolin, Douglas Brinkley, Steve Coll, David Nasaw, Jonathan Kozol, Robert Caro, Anne Applebaum, Jill Lepore and Christopher Hitchens, among others—or unexpected surprises like Gabrielle Bell’s outstanding graphic memoir, Ben Sandmel’s comprehensive, lavishly illustrated biography of New Orleans great Ernie K-Doe or Francis Spufford’s kaleidoscopic history of the economics of the Soviet Union, there are plenty of gems here to discover. Spread out over a diverse variety of subjects and topics and representing more than 20 different publishers—and even more imprints—the Best Nonfiction Books of 2012 list amply demonstrates that, even as bookstores continue to disappear and libraries see their budgets cut even further, quality books are still out there. And for the best of the best, check out the top-25 list at the end. —Eric Liebetrau

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power

Meacham, Jon Random House (800 pp.) $35.00 Nov. 13, 2012 978-1-4000-6766-4

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STELLA ADLER ON AMERICA’S MASTER PLAYWRIGHTS

Adler, Stella Knopf (368 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 16, 2012 978-0-679-42443-7

Brilliant lectures on the American masters from the late, legendary acting teacher. The indomitable Stella Adler (1901– 1992), who tutored Marlon Brando, displays both her omnivorous intellect and decades of experience in this generous second volume of acting-class lectures (following Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, 1999) edited by celebrity biographer Paris (Garbo, 2002, etc.). Here, the teacher covers Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. Adler knew the play, she knew the writer, and her message to her actors was direct: You must understand the play and the playwright at both the macro and micro level. You can’t do O’Neill if you don’t know about his tormented Irish-Catholic background; you can’t perform A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman if you don’t know about postwar alienation. “If you don’t use the play’s world, you are not an actor, because the play is taken from that world, not yours, and you have to go there to find it.” Also, you must know the character’s inner and outer life: “Does he have an accent? How does he dress, how does he wear his hair?...What are the circumstances he lives in?” In Beyond the Horizon, Robert is weak, but don’t play him weak; he thinks he is strong. In Mourning Becomes Electra, play Christine like a queen; “use your epic voice, not a little intimate voice.” In The Glass Menagerie, Laura wears a leg brace; when she sits on the floor with her gentleman caller, she’s in pain. Read between the lines; follow what’s said and what isn’t. Adler has another, subtler message for her actors: Stay true to your art. An exciting, inspiring and essential book for anyone interested in American theater.

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“A consummate professional explores the attic of his life, converting rumination to art.” from winter journal

IRON CURTAIN The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956

Applebaum, Anne Doubleday (560 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 27, 2012 978-0-385-51569-6

A Pulitzer Prize–winning author returns with the story of those dark decades in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union slammed the prison doors on people, cultures and countries. Realizing she could not tell the whole story in one volume, Washington Post and Slate columnist Applebaum (Gulag: A History, 2003, etc.) focuses on Poland, East Germany and Hungary and shows how their stories were representative. She begins as World War II was ending. The Russians were plowing through Eastern Europe on their way to Berlin. While many of the Allies were thinking of home, the Soviets had grander and grimmer ideas. Applebaum shows how the communists gained political control of individual countries (they were sometimes surprised in “elections” how unpopular they were), then charts how—in the service of their iron ideology—they systematically destroyed economies, organizations, the arts, education, the press, the judiciary, the church, the entertainment industries and every other social institution. Internment camps and prisons became the true growth industries. Applebaum also explores the tactics employed to keep people in line: fear and intimidation, of course, but also a massive propaganda industry that sought to convince everyone that things were better than they were, but not nearly as good as they would be in five years or so. They invested much hope in education, believing they could indoctrinate an entire generation. It didn’t work. Periodically, the author chronicles what was happening in the West (the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift). Beginning with the death of Stalin, Applebaum shows how and why things slowly began to change. The emerging youth culture, the resurgence of religious belief, the rise of a new generation of writers and artists—these were among the factors that energized the 1956 uprisings, which, of course, the Soviets temporarily crushed. A dark but hopeful chronicle that shows how even humanity’s worst can fracture and fall.

WINTER JOURNAL

Auster, Paul Henry Holt (240 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-8050-9553-1

The acclaimed novelist (Sunset Park, 2010, etc.), now 65, writes affectingly about his body, family, lovers, travels and residences as he enters what he calls the winter of his life. 4

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Written entirely in the second person and, loosely, using the format of a journal (undated entries), Auster’s memoir courses gracefully over ground that is frequently rough, jarring and painful: the deaths of his parents, conflicts with his relatives (he settles some scores), poor decisions (his first marriage), accidents (a car crash that could have killed him) and struggles in his early career. But there are summery memories, as well: his love of baseball (begun in boyhood), his fondness for Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, his relationship with his mother, world travels (not all cheery; he recalls a near fistfight with a French taxi driver), books and friends. Most significant: his 30-year relationship with his wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (unnamed here), whom he continually celebrates. Some of the loveliest sentences in the text—and there are many—are illuminated by love. Near the end, Auster recalls visits with her family in Minnesota, a terrain so unlike what he knew (he lives in Brooklyn). Here, too, are moments of failure (not speaking up when he should have), of illness and injury, of sly humor. The author follows a grim description of a bout with the crabs with a paean to nature that begins, “Ladybugs were considered good luck.” Auster indulges in the occasional rant—he goes off on the crudities of contemporary culture—and delivers numerous moments of artful craft. A consummate professional explores the attic of his life, converting rumination to art.

BAILOUT An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street Barofsky, Neil Free Press (288 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 24, 2012 978-1-4516-8493-3

A former watchdog in the federal government attacks the officials who perpetuated the financial meltdown by kowtowing to behemoth banks and Wall Street firms while abandoning the public interest. Barofsky was a federal prosecutor in New York in 2008 when his boss encouraged him to apply for a newly created position in Washington, D.C., as inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Created during the waning months of the Bush administration and inherited by President Barack Obama, TARP allocated hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to allegedly stabilize too-big-to-fail banks, strengthen investment firms and rescue homeowners from foreclosure. Ignorant of cutthroat Washington politics, Barofsky, a Democrat, won confirmation by the U.S. Senate despite Republican Party dominance and set out to account for the TARP spending in a transparent, nonpartisan manner. However, as he demonstrates in his energetically written first-person account, he and his staff met resistance every time they tried to share the truth with Congress, the White House and the American public. The villains are numerous, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at the top of the list. Of course, it’s possible that some of the negative characterizations nonfiction

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THE VOYEURS

shared by Barofsky involve score-settling or well-intentioned differences. That seems unlikely, however, since the author provides copious evidence of the petty attacks on his office by Geithner, other Treasury Department officials, White House staff members, senators and representatives, coddled journalists and ill-informed bloggers. Barofsky’s account contains enough selfdeprecation that he does not come off as a holier-than-thou hero. A courageous, insightful book that offers no cause for optimism.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? A Comic Drama

Bechdel, Alison Illus. by Bechdel, Alison Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (224 pp.) $22.00 | May 1, 2012 978-0-618-98250-9

A psychologically complex, ambitious, illuminating successor to the author’s graphic-memoir masterpiece. Though Bechdel had previously enjoyed a cult following with her long-standing comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, she raised the bar for graphic narrative with her book debut, Fun Home (2006). That memoir detailed her childhood in the family’s funeral home, her closeted and emotionally distant father’s bisexuality, his questionable death (an accident that was most likely a suicide) and the author’s own coming to terms with her sexuality. On the surface, this is the “mom book” following the previous “dad book.” Yet it goes more deeply into the author’s own psychology (her therapy, dreams, relationships) and faces a fresh set of challenges. For one thing, the author’s mother is not only still alive, but also had very mixed feelings about how much Bechdel had revealed about the family in the first volume. For another, the author’s relationship with her mother—who withheld verbal expressions of love and told her daughter she was too old to be tucked in and kissed goodnight when she turned 7—is every bit as complicated as the one she detailed with her father. Thus, Bechdel not only searches for keys to their relationship, but perhaps even for surrogate mothers, through therapy, girlfriends and the writings of Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Alice Miller and others. Yet the primary inspiration in this literary memoir is psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose life and work Bechdel explores along with her own. Incidentally, the narrative also encompasses the writing of and response to Fun Home, a work that changed the author’s life and elevated her career to a whole new level. She writes that she agonized over the creation of this follow-up for four years. It is a book she had to write, though she struggled mightily to figure out how to write it. Subtitled “A Comic Drama,” the narrative provides even fewer laughs than its predecessor but deeper introspection.

Bell, Gabrielle Illus. by Bell, Gabrielle Uncivilized Books (160 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-9846814-0-2 “Graphic memoir” only hints at the artistry of a complex, literary-minded author who resists the bare-all confessionalism so common to the genre and blurs the distinction between fiction and

factual introspection. Who are “The Voyeurs?” In the short, opening title piece, they are a mixed-gender group standing on an urban rooftop, watching a couple have sex through a window in a nearby building. They tend to find the experience “uncomfortable,” even “creepy,” though those who remain raptly silent may well be more interested, even titillated. Bell (Lucky, 2006, etc.) is also a voyeur of sorts, chronicling the lives of others in significant detail while contemplating her own. As she admits before addressing an arts class in frigid Minneapolis, where she knows the major interest will be on how she has been able to turn her comics into a career, “I feel I need to disclaim this ‘story.’ I set myself the task of reporting my trip, though there’s not much to it, and I can’t back out now. It’s my compulsion to do this, it’s my way, I suppose, of fighting against the meaninglessness constantly crowding in.” The memoir encompasses travels that take her from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and from Japan to France, while addressing the challenges of long-distance relationships, panic attacks, contemporary feminism, Internet obsessiveness, the temptation to manipulate life to provide material for her work, and the ultimate realization, in the concluding “How I Make My Comics,” of her creative process: “Then I want to blame everyone I’ve known ever for all the failures and frustrations of my life, and I want to call someone up and beg them to please help me out of this misery somehow, and when I realize how futile both these things are I feel the cold, sharp sting of the reality that I’m totally and utterly alone in the world. Then I slap on a punchline and bam, I’m done.” Playfully drawn and provocatively written, the memoir reinforces Bell’s standing among the first rank of the genre’s artists.

38 NOOSES Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End

Berg, Scott W. Pantheon (336 pp.) $27.95 | Dec. 4, 2012 978-0-307-37724-1 978-0-307-90739-4 e-book

An exploration of the violent downfall of Little Crow’s Dakota nation at the hands of American soldiers. |

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“Stellar cultural writing—Bissell has the knowledge and wit to earn his provocations.” from magic hours

Washington Post contributor Berg (Writing and Literature/ George Mason Univ.; Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C., 2007) focuses on the rising escalation between the Dakota people and white settlers, a conflict that came to a head in the summer of 1862, when four inebriated Native Americans carelessly murdered a few white settlers. While Dakota chief Little Crow did not condone the reckless behavior, he recognized that “the day of reckoning was bound to arrive no matter how accommodating and pliable he might be.” As expected, U.S. soldiers soon retaliated, though the battle had long been brewing, especially for the Dakotas, who were frustrated by the federal government’s continued failures to make good on its promised annuities to the Natives. With their credit lines running thin, the Dakota people fought for their survival, though insult was added to their injurious defeat when a military trial sentenced 300 Dakota warriors to death for their role in the battle. While President Lincoln intervened to lessen the number to 38, the mass hanging still earned the dubious honor of becoming the largest public execution in American history. Throughout the sweeping narrative, Berg skillfully weaves in various perspectives, including that of Sarah Wakefield, a woman held captive by the Dakotas, and Bishop Henry Whipple, a paternalistic advocate for the Native people. Yet Berg’s greater accomplishment is his ability to overlap the little-known Dakota War with its far better known counterpart, the American Civil War. The author’s juxtaposition offers readers a contextual framework that provides unique insight into the era. For instance, just days after the mass execution, Lincoln issued the text for the Emancipation Proclamation, prompting curious readers to wonder: How does a country see fit to condemn one group of people to death and then, less than a week later, set another group free? A captivating tale of an oft-overlooked, morally ambiguous moment in American history. (b/w illustrations throughout)

MAGIC HOURS Essays on Creators and Creation

Bissell, Tom Believer Books/McSweeney’s (304 pp.) $14.00 paperback | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-936365-76-0 A whip-smart, occasionally pugnacious collection of essays on culture from a wide-ranging critic. In recent years, Bissell (Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, 2010, etc.) has built a reputation as an expert on video games, culminating with the scattershot Extra Lives. Here, he covers a wider swath but provides more coherence, in part because a more consistent theme emerges: the necessity of calling shenanigans on the artificiality of much of mass culture and the difficult search for glimmers of integrity. In “Escanaba’s Magic Hour,” Bissell follows the filming of an indie movie in his hardscrabble Upper Peninsula hometown and cannily reveals subtle parrying between the townsfolk and the 6

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visiting filmmakers. In “Writing about Writing about Writing,” he demolishes the rhetoric of how-to writing guides, slapping the genre for its disingenuously upbeat declarations. In “Cinema Crudité,” he investigates the anti-genius of Tommy Wiseau, director of the contemporary camp classic, The Room. Bissell can tear into his subjects with a ferocity and brutal wit that recalls Dwight Macdonald, as when he writes about the wouldbe literary provocateurs of the Underground Literary Alliance or celebrated historian Robert Kaplan, whom he damns as an “incompetent thinker and a miserable writer.” Bissell’s more common tone, though, is that of the exasperated critic weary of conventional thinking, and he bookends the collection with pieces that drive that point home: “Unflowered Aloes” debunks the idea that literary greatness will always be discovered, and the closing interview with Jim Harrison is a lament for a dying working-class literary culture. Even the book’s weak spots are strong: A pair of New Yorker profiles on TV and video game professionals feel relatively voiceless—a problem with the magazine’s house style that, ironically enough, Bissell calls out in an earlier essay. Stellar cultural writing—Bissell has the knowledge and wit to earn his provocations.

VISIT SUNNY CHERNOBYL And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places Blackwell, Andrew Rodale (320 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 5, 2012 978-1-60529-445-2 978-1-60961-456-0 e-book

Humor and dry wit lighten a travelogue of the most polluted and ravaged places in the world. Through seven nasty sites, journalist and filmmaker Blackwell teases out complex environmental issues and the history and cultures that surround them. The author conceived of the book because “to chase after the beautiful and pristine was to abandon most of the world.” Ultimately, he writes, “instead of finding degraded ecosystems that I could treat as though they were beautiful, I was just finding beauty.” The author engagingly chronicles his many adventures: canoeing near Chernobyl, museum-hopping by the oil sands of Northern Alberta, and piloting a ship through the Sabine-Neches Waterway in Port Arthur, Texas, “the pungent centerpiece of America’s petrochemical tiara.” Along the way, we meet colorful characters and learn what fuels these toxic places. Blackwell then sails off for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, formed by a vortex of currents that gathers buoyant plastic into a huge floating mess. Moving on to the Amazon, where issues are far from black and white, the author delves into the issue of why rain forest destruction is so complicated, particularly when the forest is inhabited. The author also visited Linfen, China, the heart of the country’s coal-producing region and reputedly the most polluted place on nonfiction

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“The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition.” from behind the beautiful forevers

the planet. The final chapter covers a pilgrimage of sorts along the sacred Yamuna River in India, or at least the former channel of the river—the water has been diverted and its bed is filled with sewage and waste. In each chapter, Blackwell finds he loves the polluted places for all the ways they aren’t ruined. With great verve, and without sounding preachy, he exposes the essence and interconnectedness of these environmental problems.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Boo, Katherine Random House (288 pp.) $28.00 | CD $35.00 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-1-4000-6755-8 978-0-307-93405-5 CD In her debut, Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker staff writer Boo creates an intimate, unforgettable portrait of India’s urban poor. Mumbai’s sparkling new airport and surrounding luxury hotels welcome visitors to the globalized, privatized, competitive India. Across the highway, on top of tons of garbage and next to a vast pool of sewage, lies the slum of Annawadi, one of many such places that house the millions of poor of Mumbai. For more than three years, Boo lived among and learned from the residents, observing their struggles and quarrels, listening to their dreams and despair, recording it all. She came away with a detailed portrait of individuals daring to aspire but too often denied a chance—their lives viewed as an embarrassment to the modernized wealthy. The author poignantly details these many lives: Abdul, a quiet buyer of recyclable trash who wished for nothing more than what he had; Zehrunisa, Abdul’s mother, a Muslim matriarch among hostile Hindu neighbors; Asha, the ambitious slum leader who used her connections and body in a vain attempt to escape from Annawadi; Manju, her beautiful, intelligent daughter whose hopes lay in the new India of opportunity; Sunil, the master scavenger, a little boy who would not grow; Meena, who drank rat poison rather than become a teenage bride in a remote village; Kalu, the charming garbage thief who was murdered and left by the side of the road. Boo brilliantly brings to life the residents of Annawadi, allowing the reader to know them and admire the fierce intelligence that allows them to survive in a world not made for them. The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition.

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THE LAST VIKING The Life of Roald Amundsen

Bown, Stephen R. Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo (320 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 25, 2012 978-0306820670

Bown (1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half, 2012, etc.) delivers an intensely researched, thoroughly enjoyable life of one of history’s best explorers. As the author demonstrates, Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) was certainly the most skilled polar explorer. Obsessed with adventure from boyhood, the teenage Amundsen led companions on exhausting attempts to cross the mountains of his native Norway during winter. He joined the 1897 Belgian Antarctic expedition, receiving a painful education on the consequences of poor planning. In 1903, he outfitted a fishing boat with a crew of six and crossed the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Alaska. Moored for two years in the Arctic, he eagerly learned from the local Inuit. The lessons he learned— ignorance of which killed many polar explorers—included: Animal-skin clothes trump wool, and transportation requires dogs and skis. The crossing gave Amundsen international celebrity, making it easier to finance an expedition to the North Pole. When both Robert Peary and Frederick Cook claimed to have reached it (a controversy that persists), Amundsen aimed for the South Pole, announcing the decision before Robert Falcon Scott announced his expedition. Superbly organized and supplied, Amundsen’s expert skiers and dog handlers won the race in 1911 and survived, while Scott’s less efficient team died. After World War I, Amundsen failed to reach the North Pole by plane but succeeded by dirigible, finally disappearing in 1928 while flying to rescue another expedition. A superb biography of a fiercely driven explorer who traveled across the last inaccessible areas on earth before technical advances made the journey much easier. (16 pages of b/w photographs)

CRONKITE

Brinkley, Douglas Harper/HarperCollins (832 pp.) $34.99 | May 29, 2012 978-0-06-137426-5 Oversized biography of the largerthan-life newscaster, still a byword for a TV anchor, at least among viewers of a certain age. As Vanity Fair contributor Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 2009, etc.) writes, Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) was an indifferent student but a constant reader, attuned in childhood to what we would |

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h dav i d b y r n e

HOW MUSIC WORKS

Byrne, David McSweeney’s (352 pp.) $32.00 Sept. 12, 2012 978-1-936365-53-1

There may be no other artist in the world of modern music quite as versatile as David Byrne. As one of the founders of Talking Heads, he revolutionized the New Wave movement with his histrionic performances of songs like “Life During Wartime” and “Burning Down the House.” Today, he continues to polish his polymathic skills with forays into film (This Must Be the Place, 2012) and literature (Bicycle Diaries, 2009, etc.) as well as theater, art, and music—Byrne is currently between tours for his newest collaboration, Love This Giant, recorded with Annie Clark, known by her stage name, St. Vincent. In a starred review, Kirkus called his latest book, How Music Works, “A supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life.” We caught up with the enigmatic singer in the United Kingdom, where Byrne is in the midst of a vivid speaking tour about his new book.

I got to where I am and my decision process in getting there.

Q: You mention in the acknowledgements that you shared some journal entries with Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s some years ago. How long have you been writing your thoughts and perceptions on the musician’s life and the mechanics of making music?

A: The enhanced e-book version (which only plays on certain devices and formats) has loads and loads of music snippets to illustrate what I refer to in the text. It seems a perfect use of the possibilities of those devices. I’m curious for feedback from readers who’ve messed with those versions. In collecting and choosing the sound snippets, I’d generally ask my office if each one really made the idea clearer, and in most cases, they said they did.

A: I’ve been writing down odd notes since before Talking Heads’ days—some of them from that period are pretty strange. One is trying to imagine some perfect transmission/reception of sound, direct into the brain—really nutty stuff. The things I sent Dave Eggers years ago were more anecdotes from the road. I think I was touring Turkey and the Balkans at that point, so everything was a bit strange and new. Q: Did How Music Works grow from those exercises or from your extensive journal, or was it composed independently? A: This book really grew out of some commissioned pieces, a TED talk and a couple of blog posts—all of which, in retrospect, I realized had to do with how various contexts affected the music we hear. Some of those early pieces and directions were abandoned in the process, but they made me realize there might be enough angles on the subject to justify a book. Q: How Music Works is marvelously diverse. At times it reads like a richly composed textbook, and at other times, it’s nearly confessional. What tone were you trying to strike as you were writing the book?

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A: A bit like trying to explain a joke here, but as we (composers and writers) begin to work on a piece of music, it has its own effects on us, it draws out emotions, if it’s well done, and makes specific compositional demands. It’s almost as if one is making a machine that is designed to have a powerful effect on us. Q: How does the e-book version of How Music Works enhance the experience of reading it?

Q: One chapter is devoted to performance. How do you think your performing has changed during your numerous iterations? A: In the beginning, I wanted to wipe the slate clean, to start from zero and not allow any elements of stagecraft or performance in, but I soon realized that just the act of getting on stage is an artificial situation, so pretending that it’s “real” involves a bit of denial. That said, when I do include elements that are stagy or perfomative, I try to be transparent about it. I try to let the audience see what we’re doing and how we do it. Q: Your tour for How Music Works is unusual and includes conversations about different aspects of music with people ranging from Cory Doctorow to Trent Reznor. What can people expect from one of your events? A: People can expect a conversation about some aspect of music and performance. Usually, we specify what we’ll be talking about in the title of the program. Sometimes we end up barely referring to the book, which is fine by me. The idea is to stimulate discussion, and I think it’s working. The December event at the New York Public Library should be interesting. —By Clayton Moore

For the full interview, please visit kirkus.com. |

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p h oto © C ATA L IN A KU LC ZA R

A: I hoped that it would feel like me telling you some interesting insights or anecdotes that I remembered or that occurred to me. Though some chapters are pretty heavily researched, I hope I balanced those bits with personal reactions to that information and vice versa. I hope that the more autobiographical parts are a way of explaining how

Q: You have this wonderful observation in your chapter on studio recording: “We don’t make music—it makes us.” How does that thought encapsulate the ideas and themes that make up How Music Works?

call the news, if at a different pace and intensity. It wasn’t an easy childhood: Cronkite’s father was an alcoholic, his parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up in the alien confines of coastal Texas, far from his prized Missouri. Nonetheless, he more than rose to the occasion, learning how to speak in a “radio voice” while still a teenager: “In true Lowell Thomas fashion, he interviewed anyone who would stand still and speak into whatever faux microphone prop he held.” He also apprenticed at the Houston Post, learning how to write a lean news story, and he had a forward-looking habit, sensing that wire stories were going to be replaced by man-on-the-ground coverage and that television, when it arrived, would surpass radio and other media. Brinkley is very good on Cronkite’s early distinction as a war correspondent in World War II under the influence of Edward R. Murrow. The author also gives Cronkite credit for being out ahead on certain stories, such as gay rights, the collapse of the Vietnam War and Watergate. He hints that Cronkite could be a touch prickly and sensitive—for one thing, about his lack of a college degree—but the author doesn’t press that far enough; one wants to know more about the enmity between Cronkite and Dan Rather, for example. For all the book’s weight, Brinkley, a dutiful and plodding writer, skimps here and there where he should not. The great correspondent and Cronkite-colleague Richard Threlkeld, for instance, gets but a single passing mention. Still, the best portrait of Cronkite—that legendary journalist, certainly worthy of a big biography—that we have.

HELLO GOODBYE HELLO A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings Brown, Craig Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4516-8360-8

A hilarious collection of strange-buttrue tales of encounters between the rich and famous. BBC Radio Host, Daily Mail columnist and all-around English wit Brown (The Lost Diaries, 2010, etc.) delivers a fine and funny assortment of oddball celebrity meetings and matchups. Some are well-known, such as when a drug-addled Elvis Presley met Richard Nixon, or Marilyn Monroe snuggled up to visiting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. At least one is historically important: when Prince Felix Youssoupoff lured Grigori Rasputin to his death. Most, however, are delightfully inconsequential, whether it’s Harpo Marx driving Sergei Rachmaninoff bonkers with his harp playing, Sarah Miles sharing tea with a thighsqueezing nonagenarian named Bertrand Russell, or Leonard Cohen having a quickie with Janis Joplin (and getting a song out of it). Some encounters go off without a hitch, such as between mutual admirers Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. Others slightly misfire; Groucho Marx tries to impress dinner companion T.S. Eliot by quoting The Waste Land, only to find the poet “was thoroughly familiar with his poems and didn’t need me to |

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recite them.” At least they talked, which is barely more than can be said for James Joyce and Marcel Proust. There are also plenty of bad dates, whether it’s Madonna snatching off Michael Jackson’s glasses and sailing them across the room, Isadora Duncan tempting Auguste Rodin with her perfect young body, or Allen Ginsberg making an awkward pass at Francis Bacon. Brown is as smart as he is puckish, and there are plenty of laughs on this terrific trip through modern fame.

HOW MUSIC WORKS

Byrne, David McSweeney’s (352 pp.) $32.00 | Sep. 12, 2012 978-1-936365-53-1

From the former Talking Heads frontman, a supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life. Drawing on a lifetime of music-making as an amateur, professional, performer, producer, band member and solo artist, Byrne (Bicycle Diaries, 2009) tackles the question implicit in his title from multiple angles: How does music work on the ear, brain and body? How do words relate to music in a song? How does live performance relate to recorded performance? What effect has technology had on music, and music on technology? Fans of the Talking Heads should find plenty to love about this book. Steering clear of the conflicts leading to the band’s breakup, Byrne walks through the history, album by album, to illustrate how his views about performance and recording changed with the onset of fame and (small) fortune. He devotes a chapter to the circumstances that made the gritty CBGB nightclub an ideal scene for adventurous artists like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Tom Verlaine and Television. Always an intensely thoughtful experimenter, here he lets us in on the thinking behind the experiments. But this book is not just, or even primarily, a rock memoir. It’s also an exploration of the radical transformation—or surprising durability—of music from the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction through the era of iTunes and MP3s. Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world. Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.

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“Before beginning the Johnson biography, Caro published a life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker (1974), a book many scholars consider a watershed in contemporary biography. The Johnson project deserves equal praise.” from the passage of power

QUIET The Power of Introverts In a World that Can’t Stop Talking Cain, Susan Crown (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 24, 2012 978-0-307-35214-9

An enlightened Wall Street survivor exhorts wallflowers everywhere to embrace their solitude-seeking souls and fully appreciate the power of the lone wolf. Could up to one-half of a nation obsessed with Jersey Shore narcissism and American Idol fame really be inhabited by reserved, sensitive types? According to Cain, yes—and we better start valuing their insight. Extroverts have their place, but things can quickly go haywire when we start confusing assertiveness with competence—the economic meltdown on Wall Street was the most stunning recent example. Had there been a few more conscientious, contemplative introverts in the boardroom (and had they made themselves heard), Cain writes, the country’s fortunes would now be decidedly different. But today’s prevailing susceptibility to “reward sensitivity,” as embodied by alpha-dog Wall Street types, wasn’t always the norm. Cain provides fascinating insight into how the United States shifted from an introvert-leaning “cult of character” to an extrovert-leaning “cult of personality” ruled by the largerthan-life Tony Robbinses of the world. Readers will learn that the tendency for some to be reserved is actually hard-wired, and as every evolutionary biologist will tell you, innate characteristics are there for a reason—to help humans survive and thrive. The author also boldly tackles introverts themselves, as well as the ambivalence many often feel about being relegated to the corner. “Stick to your guns,” writes fellow introvert Cain. The author’s insights are so rich that she could pen two separate books: one about parenting an introverted child and another about how to make an introvert/extrovert relationship work. An intriguing and potentially life-altering examination of the human psyche that is sure to benefit both introverts and extroverts alike.

THE PASSAGE OF POWER The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Caro, Robert A. Knopf (704 pp.) $35.00 | CD $39.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-679-40507-8 978-1-455-89048-4 CD

The fourth volume of one of the most anticipated English-language biographies of the past 30 years. This installment covers Johnson’s vice presidency under 10

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John F. Kennedy, his ascension to the presidency after the Kennedy assassination and his initial nine months as president. As in the earlier volumes, Caro (Master of the Senate, 2002, etc.) combines a compelling narrative and insightful authorial judgments into a lengthy volume that will thrill those who care about American politics, the foundations of power, or both. Even Johnson acolytes, sometimes critical about portions of the earlier volumes, are less likely to complain about their hero’s portrayal here. While documenting the progression of his subject’s character flaws, Caro admires Johnson’s adroit adaptability. Though he chafed as vice president after giving up the leadership of the U.S. Senate, Johnson seems to have developed a grudging admiration for JFK. However, Johnson and Robert Kennedy could not put aside the animosity that had taken root on Capitol Hill. When Robert became not only his brother’s confidant but also his attorney general, Johnson resented the appointment. Caro documents the feuds between them and vividly relates how the warfare between the two men continued after JFK’s assassination. On a more upbeat track, the author explains how Johnson’s lifelong commitment to helping the dispossessed led to passage of unprecedented civil-rights legislation. The evidence seems strong that JFK could not have engineered passage of much of the civil-rights legislation because he lacked Johnson’s influence over members of Congress. The fifth volume is in the works, and it is expected to cover Johnson’s election to the White House and his full term, with the conduct of the Vietnam War ceaselessly dogging him. The author writes that the next book “will be very different in tone.” Before beginning the Johnson biography, Caro published a life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker (1974), a book many scholars consider a watershed in contemporary biography. The Johnson project deserves equal praise.

PRIVATE EMPIRE ExxonMobil and American Power

Coll, Steve Penguin Press (688 pp.) $36.00 | May 1, 2012 978-1-59420-335-0

A thorough, sobering study of the pernicious consolidation of Big Oil. With admirable restraint, New Yorker contributor and two-time Pulitzer winner Coll (The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, 2008, etc.) demonstrates how the merger of Exxon and Mobil has allowed the company to wield more power and wealth than even the American government, in the manner of John D. Rockefeller. Exxon had functioned as an independent corporate state since its antitrust break-off from Standard Oil in 1911 and was ranked by profit performance in the top five corporations from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War. With the catastrophic spill of the Valdez in Alaska in 1989, the network of secrecy and internal security within Exxon was exposed but hardly tempered. The iron chief who emerged from the crisis, Lee Raymond, reappraised risk nonfiction

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and security within the organization and took a hard line against efforts to extract from it punitive damages. Moving the headquarters to Texas in 1993, the company retrenched in its nose-thumbing determination to encourage and supply America’s thirst for oil, casting around at more far-flung spots in the world that could provide the crude—such as where Mobil held attractive assets, in places like West Africa, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi. The Exxon-Mobil merger in 1999 created a global behemoth and also provoked small wars at drilling spots where the poor and disenfranchised deeply resented foreign workers on native soil and disrupted the extraction by violence and insurgency. Raymond and his cohorts’ cynical spin on the denial of global warming and the role of the burning of fossil fuels makes for jaw-dropping reading, as does the company’s cunning manipulations of the war in Iraq to garner an oil deal. The Obama administration’s emphasis on renewable energy sources and environmental concerns has barely challenged the formidable political power of Big Oil. Leaks, reserves, PACs, hydrofracking, bloated corporate profits and more: all pertinent concerns nicely handled by Coll in this engaging, hard-hitting work.

AS TEXAS GOES... How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda

Collins, Gail Liveright/Norton (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 4, 2012 978-0-87140-407-7

New York Times political columnist Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, 2009, etc.) zeroes in on what makes Texas so important and why the rest of the country needs to know and care about what’s happening there. Texans, writes the author, think they live in a wide-open empty space where carrying a concealed weapon is acceptable because people have to take care of themselves and the government has no business telling them what to do. In her inimitable style, the unabashed liberal examines the shenanigans of Texans from four angles: first, a hilarious look at some of Texas’ past heroes and present politicos and at how the empty-space ethos has shaped the state’s policies; second, a close-up examination of several areas where she says the state has gone wildly, sadly wrong (its deregulation of financial markets, attempts at reforming schools and funding, or defunding, education, and major missteps on sex education, energy, the environment, pollution and global climate change); third, a scathing report on the twotiered, low-tax, low-service economy of the state; and finally, Collins’ take on where Texas, soon to be a Hispanic-majority state, is heading. The author loads her report with funny but dismaying anecdotes and dozens of revealing interviews. She does not neglect the hard facts. An appendix includes “Texas on the Brink,” a report compiled by the Legislative Study Group of the Texas House of Representatives. It gives an especially grim |

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picture of the failings of our second-largest state. Among the states, it is first in executions and in the amount of carbon dioxide emissions but 45th in SAT scores and 49th in the percentage of low-income people covered by Medicaid. In Collins’ view, the rest of us feel the influence of Texas in our lives every day, and “if Texas goes south, it’s taking us along.” A timely portrait of Texas delivered with Collins’ unique brand of insightful humor.

THE TWILIGHT WAR The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran Crist, David Penguin Press (640 pp.) $36.00 | Jul. 23, 2012 978-1-59420-341-1

An encyclopedic account of the ongoing military and diplomatic conflict between the United States and Iran. Since the fall of the shah in 1979, Iran and the United States have been thorns in each other’s sides. Iran seeks recognition as a regional power and as a champion of Shia Muslims throughout the Middle East, but its policy toward America has often been driven by a “paranoia that the real goal behind U.S. actions was the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.” America, for its part, has consistently “helped perpetuate the animosity [by displaying] a callous disregard for Iranian grievances and security concerns.” The result has been an ongoing “shadow war” in which each side has inflicted grievous casualties on the other without quite falling into open belligerence, while missing numerous opportunities for rapprochement. In a monumental debut, senior government historian Crist presents a comprehensive narrative of this conflict from the ascendancy of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the present day. Drawing on extensive access to American government leaders and documents, Crist surveys his topic in thorough, if sometimes ponderous, detail, including coverage of the bombing of the Marine base in Beirut, the Iran/Iraq war, the arms-for-hostages scandal, the naval battles of the “tanker wars,” Iran’s involvement in post-Hussein Iraq and its present pursuit of nuclear ambitions. Completely in command of the competing interests and personalities at the highest levels of American policymaking, Crist has an equally impressive grasp of the ebb and flow of diverse viewpoints in Iranian religious, political and military councils. The battle scenes are edge-of-the-seat gripping, and the author is keenly insightful on the byzantine diplomatic maneuvers, by turns farcical and dismaying, and the motivations of the politicians, clerics, Cold Warriors and con artists who have stoked the ongoing tensions between the two nations in spite of important common interests. Some casual readers may be turned off by the page count, but this is likely to be the authoritative history of the origins and progress of the Iranian policy morass for years to come.

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“A rich, highly readable examination of the seeds of poppies, trade, greed, grandeur and an international partnership that emains uneasy and perilous.” from when america first met china

AFTERMATH On Marriage and Separation

Cusk, Rachel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (160 pp.) $23.00 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-374-10213-5 A novelist’s unflinching analysis of her failed marriage. Cusk (The Bradshaw Variations, 2010, etc.) fixes an unnervingly steady gaze on the breakdown of her domestic life. “There was nothing left to dismantle,” she writes, “except the children, and that would require the intervention of science.” In her third memoir, the author brings together elements of a well-constructed novel— it’s compelling and even thrilling, despite the fact that the story is unsurprising and banal (man meets woman, and they create a family; family falls apart; man, woman and children grieve)— and its novelistic feel is a credit to Cusk’s literary risk-taking. She doesn’t tell her tale straight; instead, she weaves in figures from ancient Greek drama (Oedipus, Antigone, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra) and thickens the bare-bones plot with striking, elaborate turns of phrase and powerful images. The last and most unorthodox chapter is told, by Cusk, from the perspective of her au pair Sonia, a scared, scarred girl whom the author abruptly fired when her husband left (though she did provide her with another job). What is most startling about the Sonia chapter is not that the self-sufficient, Oxford-educated Cusk so convincingly inhabits the mind of an unskilled, young foreigner, but that she is willing to expose herself at her worst: cold, harsh, pitiless and even cruel to a woman far more vulnerable than she. Bold, gripping, original and occasionally darkly funny.

WHEN AMERICA FIRST MET CHINA An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail Dolin, Eric Jay Liveright/Norton (384 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 10, 2012 978-0-87140-433-6

The author of Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (2010) returns with the story of America’s first voyages to the Middle Kingdom, where Americans and Chinese looked at each other with wonder, alarm and calculation. Dolin begins at the end of the American Revolution. With America’s relationship with England in ruins, the country looked to the Far East. On July 22, 1784, the Empress of China sailed into the Pearl River in China. The author, whose grasp of the intricacies of international trade is firm, proceeds confidently and skillfully through a complex narrative. He describes the beginnings of trade with China, examines the mystery of silkworms and shows 12

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how China established Canton as the center for their trade with the West, whose residents craved silk but also tea (and serving sets). Soon, thousands of vessels—British and American—were sailing on the Pearl, and the most profitable commodity swiftly became opium. Everyone loved it, especially the English and the Chinese, and Americans profited handsomely from the trade. Dolin introduces us to some important American names— including Robert Morris, John Ledyard, John Jacob Astor, Robert Forbes, Harriet Low—and he relates the adventures of the first Chinese to come to America, who became sort of carnival attractions. The author also describes the perils of the voyage, the designs of the ships (and the rise and fall of the clipper ship) and the American involvement in the Opium War. A rich, highly readable examination of the seeds of poppies, trade, greed, grandeur and an international partnership that remains uneasy and perilous. (16 pages of color and 83 b/w illustrations; map)

HAITI The Aftershocks of History Dubois, Laurent Metropolitan/Henry Holt (448 pp.) $32.00 | Jan. 3, 2012 978-0-8050-9335-3

A vigorous retelling of Haiti’s history intended to revive the promise of the world’s first black-led republic. This is not a story of the decline of a small nation, but an inspiring account of the struggle against adversity for freedom and independence. Dubois (History and French Studies/Duke Univ.; Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France, 2010, etc.) narrates the story of Toussaint Louverture’s leadership of the slave population of France’s most profitable colony to independence in 1791, emancipation in 1793 and recognition by the government in 1794. The author also examines how Napoleon reversed independence and sent an army that was crushed in 1804 by Louverture and his collaborators and successors; how the Congress of Vienna secretly gave France the right to invade the country; and how Haiti was excluded from the Monroe Doctrine. Haiti was free, but a free country established by former black slaves—they had transgressed an order based not only on plantation slavery, but also racism. Invasion, blockade and isolation were used to deny Haitians their place among the free nations of the world; the United States did not recognize the country until Abraham Lincoln became president in 1860. Haiti endured until the U.S. Marines were sent to steal the country’s gold and occupy the island in 1915. Franklin Roosevelt took credit for rewriting the constitution, and corporate-owned plantation-based production was reintroduced to replace the family-based system of land tenure. As Dubois writes, “the occupation propelled Haiti’s political system backward by a century,” and the country has not been permitted to recover to the present. A profound demonstration of what needs to be recognized, reconciled and forgiven if current crises are to be overcome. nonfiction

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TURING’S CATHEDRAL The Origins of the Digital Universe Dyson, George Pantheon (432 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-375-42277-5 978-0-307-90706-6 e-book

That we live in a digital universe is indisputable; how we got there is a mesmerizing tale brilliantly told by science historian Dyson (Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965, 2002, etc.). The author establishes late 1945 as the birth date of the first stored-program machine, built at the Institute for Advanced Study, established in Princeton in 1932 as a haven for theoreticians. It happened under the watch of the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, fresh from commutes to Los Alamos where the atom bomb had been built and the hydrogen bomb was only a gleam in Edward Teller’s eye. Dyson makes clear that the motivation for some of the world’s greatest technological advances has always been to perfect instruments of war. Indeed, von Neumann’s colleagues included some who had been at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where a dedicated-purpose computer, ENIAC, had been built to calculate firing tables for anti-aircraft artillery. The IAS computer, MANIAC, was used to determine the parameters governing the fission of an atom device inside an H-bomb that would then ignite the fusion reaction. But for von Neumann and others, the MANIAC was also the embodiment of Alan Turing’s universal machine, an abstract invention in the ’30s by the mathematician who would go on to crack the Nazi’s infamous Enigma code in World War II. In addition to these stories, Dyson discusses climate and geneticmodeling projects programmed on the MANIAC. The use of wonderful quotes and pithy sketches of the brilliant cast of characters further enriches the text. Who knew that eccentric mathematician/logician Kurt Gödel had married a Viennese cabaret dancer? Meticulously researched and packed with not just technological details, but sociopolitical and cultural details as well—the definitive history of the computer. (16 pages of b/w illustrations)

LIFE AFTER DEATH

Echols, Damien Blue Rider Press (384 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-399-16020-2 Exceptional memoir by the most famous of the West Memphis Three. In 1993, Echols (Almost Home, 2005) was convicted, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., in the case of the sadistic sex murders and mutilations of three young boys in the woods around their hometown of |

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West Memphis, Ark. The state’s case was based almost entirely on the confession wrung out of Misskelley, who, writes the author, had the “intellect of a child” and who recanted soon afterward. Witnesses’ testimonies to Echols’ “demonic” character sealed the defendants’ fates. Baldwin and Misskelley each received life sentences; Echols, perceived to be the ringleader of an alleged “satanic cult,” was sentenced to death. Over the next decade, an HBO trilogy of documentaries on the case, collectively titled Paradise Lost, helped spark an international campaign to free the West Memphis Three. Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins and Peter Jackson were among the celebrities who became personally involved in the case; thanks to their efforts, and especially those of Echols’ wife, Lorri, whom he met during his prison term, the three were released in August 2011. Those bare facts alone would make for an interesting story. However, Echols is at heart a poet and mystic, and he has written not just a quickie one-off book to capitalize on a lurid news story, but rather a work of art that occasionally bears a resemblance to the work of Jean Genet. A voracious reader all his life, Echols vividly tells his story, from his impoverished childhood in a series of shacks and mobile homes to his emergence after half a lifetime behind bars as a psychically scarred man rediscovering freedom in New York City. The author also effectively displays his intelligence and sensitivity, qualities the Arkansas criminal justice system had no interest in recognizing during Echols’ ordeal. Essential reading for anyone interested in justice or memoir. (Two 8-page full-color photo inserts)

BEAUTIFUL THING Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars

Faleiro, Sonia Black Cat/Grove (240 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-8021-7092-7

A harsh, cinematic look at the international sex trade. In 2005, Vogue contributing editor Faleiro (The Girl, 2008) met the beautiful, charismatic Leela, “the highest-paid bar dancer” in her Bombay suburb. Leela brought Faleiro into her world, an environment filled with sleazy johns, frightening pimps and, of course, other exploited young women who were trapped in a life of stripping and/or prostitution. When Bombay’s strip-club scene crashed and almost burned, Faleiro followed Leela’s quest to rebuild her life. Leela was happy to let the author report on her adventures, and the result is a glimpse into a frightening subculture unlike anything that a typical American has ever experienced. Originally published in India in 2010, the book has become an international sensation; after only a few pages, it’s easy to understand why. With crackling prose, Faleiro provides an intense, disconcertingly entertaining glimpse into the shadowy corners of a foreign culture; the fast-paced narrative, while undeniably journalistic, |

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“Forney’s story should resonate with those grappling with similar issues, while her artistry should appeal to a wide readership.” from marbles

MARBLES Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir

reads like a thriller. But what ultimately gives the book its resonance is Faleiro’s empathy and love for her fully developed subjects. In lesser hands, these young people could have come off as clichés, but the author makes sure we care for them and root for them to survive a life that most will never understand. Gritty, gripping and often heartbreaking—an impressive piece of narrative nonfiction.

PREDATOR NATION Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America

Ferguson, Charles Crown Business (288 pp.) $27.00 | May 22, 2012 978-0-307-95255-4 978-0-307-95257-8 e-book

A concise, cogent assessment of the 2008 banking disaster and how the fallout has affected the country. In his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary, Inside Job, Ferguson did a first-class job of explaining the mess on Wall Street. This book is a longer, more detailed version that underscores the film’s points, offering a broader picture of how Wall Street has poisoned the country. The author returns to the scene of the crime, where the slow rise of deregulation under President Ronald Reagan had turned into a lawless frontier by the time Clinton left office. Scrapping the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—which kept investment and commercial banks separate— allowed investment firms to indulge their greediest desires, such as credit default swaps. Their partners in crime were Ivy League economists, who were paid handsomely for either testifying before Congress or writing papers that told banks what they wanted to hear, and ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, who recklessly doled out AAA ratings to the well-heeled major firms. So why didn’t anyone go to jail? Well, you can’t break laws that don’t exist. Still, Ferguson argues that real crimes were committed, from lying to federal authorities to filing fictitious financial statements. The author makes sure we get the big picture, too: that the money-driven Wall Street culture of corruption doesn’t advance American progress; it weakens it. Ferguson points to key areas—broadband technology, innovation and education—where greed has kept America lagging behind the rest of the civilized world. A deeply argued call to action from a lucid, impassioned polemicist.

Forney, Ellen Illus. by Forney, Ellen Gotham Books (256 pp.) $20.00 paperback | Nov. 6, 2012 978-1-59240-732-3

For anyone who loves graphic memoir or has concerns about bipolar swings, creativity and medication, this narrative will prove as engaging and informative as it is inspirational. Since the connection between artistry and mental instability has been well-documented, plenty of those diagnosed with bipolar disorder share the fears articulated in this unflinchingly honest memoir by Forney (I Love Led Zeppelin, 2006, etc.). “I don’t want balance, I want brilliance!” she exclaims during one of her manic phases. “Meds would bring me down!” Taking pride in her membership in “Club van Gogh (The true artist is a crazy artist),” she subsequently suffered from periods of depression that brought her down far lower than medication even could. “During a manic episode, depression seems entirely impossible,” she writes, but depression often made it impossible for her to imagine feeling so good or feeling much of anything beyond a benumbed dread. Forney chronicles her years of therapy, her research into the literature of depression and her trial-and-error experiences with medication—and cocktails of medication— searching for the combination where the benefits outweighed the side effects. She directly confronts the challenge facing anyone trying to monitor and assess her own mental state: “How could I keep track of my mind, with my own mind?” Not only does her conversational intimacy draw readers in, but her drawings perfectly capture the exhilarating frenzy of mania and the dark void of depression. “It was a relief to discover that aiming for a balanced life doesn’t mean succumbing to a boring one,” she writes with conviction. Forney’s story should resonate with those grappling with similar issues, while her artistry should appeal to a wide readership.

THE PRESIDENTS CLUB Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity

Gibbs, Nancy and Duffy, Michael Simon & Schuster (656 pp.) $29.99 | May 8, 2012 978-1-4391-2770-4

Two Time magazine editors chart the zigzag arc of relationships among the men who have occupied the White House since the mid-20th century. With their knowledge of the territory of presidential politics and personality, Gibbs and Duffy (co-authors: The Preacher 14

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and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House, 2007) assemble a compelling account of their tangled relationships. When Truman called on Hoover to help with post–World War II recovery in Germany, the latter was in political purgatory, reviled by his own party. Throughout this massive work, the authors present numerous instances of presidents warming to their predecessors in surprising ways. Sometimes mutual admiration was already in place (Truman and Eisenhower—though it later disintegrated); sometimes, antipathy (Clinton and Bush II). But almost always, the sitting presidents found in their predecessors some solace, willing ears and sound advice. Jimmy Carter emerges as a loose cannon, combining vast international experience (and a deep humanity) with a maverick spirit and a yearning for the limelight that caused some of his successors to cringe and curse. (Oddly, the authors do not say much about Carter’s relationships with Bush II or Obama.) JFK turned to Ike at crucial times (Bay of Pigs); Clinton and Nixon developed a close relationship, though Nixon once threatened to write a negative op-ed if Clinton did not consult him about Nixon’s upcoming trip to Russia. It was Reagan, write Gibbs and Duffy, who first called Nixon back from exile. Gerald Ford emerges as a genial soul, telling scandal-ridden Clinton that he’d better confess his lies. Perhaps the closest of all relationships was between Clinton and Bush I, a friendship literally birthed by a tsunami. In a well-researched, disinterested analysis, the authors show that collisions of ego, personality and politics can often result in creation, not destruction. (16-page b/w insert)

THE NEW HATE A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right Goldwag, Arthur Pantheon (384 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-0-307-37969-6 978-0-307-90707-3 e-book

A well-reported study of disaffected groups who hate other groups whose members look or think differently than the haters. In his latest book about ideologies, freelance writer and editor Goldwag (Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, 2009, etc.) transcends numerous other books warning about the dangers of political conservatives who have assumed influence during the administrations of Reagan and the two Bushes. These haters—given voice by such high-profile individuals as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and Michelle Malkin—worry about far more than who controls American politics. They worry about the atmosphere of family life, classrooms, corporate workplaces, public parks and just about every other venue where values antithetical to their own might seep into impressionable minds. Goldwag terms the phenomenon “the paranoid style of hatred” and shows how that style has been linked to conspiracy theories for hundreds of years. The author examines with special depth hatreds against Jews, |

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Catholics, Freemasons, African-Americans and the extremely wealthy. With the election of President Barack Obama, the haters coalesced against what they saw as an obvious enemy. Goldwag is able to effectively use the hatred toward Obama to illustrate the irrationality of the haters. Given that many, perhaps most, paranoids exhibit some form of brain dysfunction and that undocumented conspiracy theories in general are linked to instability, Goldwag could have written off the haters as mentally ill. Instead, he treats their hatreds as something to be seriously researched because of their undue influence on the tenor of electoral politics, as well as almost every other aspect of daily life in America. A provocative, intellectually rigorous book written clearly and with an admirable lack of hatred.

SURVIVING SURVIVAL The Art and Science of Resilience Gonzales, Laurence Norton (304 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 10, 2012 978-0-393-08318-7

How can the world smite thee? Let us count the ways... Having limned the odds and wherefores of surviving various challenges in Deep Survival (2003) and Everyday Survival (2008), Gonzales (Lucy, 2010, etc.) looks deeply into the mental processes that enable us to cope with the trauma that often sets in during and after a challenge to our survival. Take, for instance, the prospect of falling overboard and floating in the deep ocean for five days before rescue, as happened to one woman Gonzales profiled in the first book. Though she was rescued, that was not the end of the story in real life; instead, for years, she has had to relive “the pain of thirst, the terror, the physical brutality of the sea,” while her brain has followed its well-known assumption that what happened in the past will happen in the future, no matter how rare the chances of being shipwrecked. Here Gonzales narrates plenty of grim and gruesome tales, not all of them elective; his survivors are those who have suffered war and terrorism as well as falls off mountains and into choppy surf. The best parts are not those harrowing stories, though, but instead the author’s contemplative explanations of the science behind, for instance, how the amygdala works, a blend of inheritance and hard-won education. Pity us poor primates and our amygdalae, for, as he writes, “[w]hen bad things happen, this system can be the source of much sorrow.” One manifestation is the “rage circuit,” which so often afflicts soldiers returning from combat. Those who adapt well to the post-traumatic stress share points in common. One characteristic of success, writes Gonzales, is the ability to step outside oneself to help others, which is “one of the most therapeutic steps you can take.” Survivors of traumatic events often do not recover without help from others, and Gonzales’ excellent book is an education for those wishing to be of use in a stressful, often frightening world. |

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“An extraordinary, intimate view of life in an old-growth forest.” from the forest unseen

PORTRAIT OF A NOVEL Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Gorra, Michael Liveright/Norton (384 pp.) $29.95 | Aug. 27, 2012 978-0-87140-408-4

Gorra (English/Smith Coll.; The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany, 2004, etc.) blends a focused biography of Henry James (1843–1916) with the story of his composition of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Throughout this work of astonishing scholarship, Gorra directs our attention to the quotidian life of James (and his remarkable family), his composition of the novel (which first appeared in serial installments in the Atlantic here and Macmillan’s Magazine in England), the significance of the events and characters in the story, and the influence of the novel on the subsequent fiction of James and others. Gorra also blends accounts of his own visits to important James sites in America, England and elsewhere. After a brief introduction to James’ life and to the novel, the author establishes his narrative pattern: chapters about the novel followed by others about James’ activities, family, friends, typists, contemporaries and so on. We read about his relationships with Atlantic editor William Dean Howells and with James’ gifted brother William. We follow his travels to England, France and Italy; we visit his final home in Rye; we view his intimate relationships with Constance Fenimore Woolson and others—including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Gorra does not accept the suggestion that Holmes and James had sexual encounters). We also see him, near the end of his life, visiting and comforting hospitalized World War I soldiers. But most of Gorra’s book examines Portrait—its creation, significance and revision (for the New York Edition in 1908). The author argues that chapter 42 of the novel, Isabel Archer’s reverie, is “one of James’ greatest achievements and a turning point in the history of the novel.” Not for all readers, but Gorra’s approach will appeal to scholars, fans of the James family, and lovers of important novels and those who create them. (10 illustrations)

FREEDOM’S CAP The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War

Gugliotta, Guy Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (512 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-8090-4681-2

Partisan bickering, back-stabbing rivalries, xenophobia, character assassination, political moves that would make Machiavelli blush—no, not Washington circa 2011, but the Washington Capitol in the 1850s. 16

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

Former Washington Post congressional correspondent Gugliotta (co-author: Kings of Cocaine, 1989) returns with a prodigiously researched, generously illustrated account of the transformation of the U. S. Capitol from a cramped, cold, noisy, inadequate and ugly structure into today’s massive marble symbol of democracy. For those knowing little about the building, there are surprises on virtually every page. As the nation careened toward the Civil War, it was Jefferson Davis who championed the Capitol’s cause, fighting for the funds that the enormous project required. The author begins in the mid-1850s with the issue of Thomas Crawford’s statue, Freedom, now perched atop the Capitol dome. The original design featured a figure wearing a freedom cap, symbol of a liberated slave. Davis had a problem with that (the cap doesn’t appear on the final figure), but the great contest that Gugliotta outlines was between Army engineer Montgomery C. Meigs and architect Thomas Ustick Walter, both of whom would, at times, have control of the project. Both had ferocious work ethics, as well as enormous egos; their struggle raged for years as they contended for credit for the work. Gugliotta pauses occasionally to provide necessary historical and architectural context—including stories about marble quarries and ironworks; John Brown (whom he labels a terrorist); Presidents Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln; and the many artisans and artists, principally Constantino Brumidi, whose massive work still astonishes visitors who look upward in the rotunda. Impressive research underlies a well-told story that’s simultaneously depressing (what a nasty species we are) and inspiring (what a wonderful species we are). (65 b/w illustrations)

THE FOREST UNSEEN A Year’s Watch in Nature

Haskell, David George Viking (260 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 19, 2012 978-0-670-02337-0

An extraordinary, intimate view of life in an old-growth forest. “Can the whole forest be seen through a small contemplative window of leaves, rocks, and water?” This is the question Haskell (Biology/Univ. of the South) set out to answer by examining one square meter of old-growth Tennessee woods. Highly informative and entertaining, these short essays are dense with sensory details and deserve to be read slowly and carefully. The sights, smells and sounds of the forest permeate the pages, bringing readers face to face with a panoply of simple natural wonders: leaves, wildflowers, mosses, ferns, snails, salamanders, deer and more. Throughout an entire calendar year, Haskell scrutinizes this “mandala” of space, connecting the microcosm of birds, plants and animals in this patch of woods to the macrocosm of the outer world. This in-depth look into the natural biosphere emphasizes the idea that nothing—not even the small microbes that exist in the leaf litter—lives unrelated or unconnected to nonfiction

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any other thing. What happens in this old forest is affected by and will in turn affect other parts of the planet. Even as Haskell discovered an “ecological and evolutionary kinship with the forest,” he also realized “an equally powerful sense of otherness...a realization of the enormity of [his] ignorance…[where] simple enumeration and naming of the mandala’s inhabitants lie far beyond [his] reach.” Equally as informative as and far more enjoyable than any biology textbook, the book provides valuable insight and perspective on a world that is often missed in the bustle of modern society. Exceptional observations of the biological world worthy of any naturalist’s library.

TWILIGHT OF THE ELITES America After Meritocracy

Hayes, Christopher L. Crown (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 12, 2012 978-0-307-72045-0

In this forcefully written debut, Nation editor at large and MSNBC host Hayes examines some of the consequences of accumulating institutional failures. Whether discussing the dysfunctions of government, Fortune 500 companies, Catholic bishops or Major League Baseball, the author traces common features to a “broad and devastating crisis of authority” resulting from a breakdown in trust. Hayes examines the relationship between trust and authority and shows that what we actually know usually depends on others, ultimately on a source of institutional authority such as a political party. “We don’t acknowledge that our most fundamental, shared beliefs about how society should operate are deeply elitist,” writes the author. “We have accepted that there will be some class of people that will make the decisions for us, and if we just manage to find the right ones, then all will go smoothly.” Hayes uses the term elite differently than the manner employed by Fox News or Sarah Palin. He defines it as a “small, powerful and connected” group with “three main sources of power: money, platform, and networks.” Of course, money can confer power and buy the other forms of influence, so what was once trusted may no longer be considered either competent or as acting in good faith. Many policymakers put forth education as the answer. Hayes insists that it is no longer enough, arguing that equality of opportunity must be complemented with equality of outcomes, through tax reforms and other measures. A provocative discussion of the deeper causes of our current discontent, written with verve and meriting wide interest.

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THE STORY OF EARTH The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

Hazen, Robert M. Viking (300 pp.) $27.95 | May 1, 2012 978-0-670-02355-4

Hazen (Earth Science/George Mason Univ.; Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins, 2005, etc.) offers startling evidence that “Earth’s living and nonliving spheres” have co-evolved over the past 4 billion years. To support his persuasive though controversial views, the author updates evidence collected by mineralogists over the last two centuries. Describing the “discoveries of organisms in places long considered inhospitable [to life] – in superheated volcanic vents, acidic pools, Arctic ice and stratospheric dust,” he argues for the dating of the origin of life more than a billion years earlier than estimates based on Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey’s groundbreaking experiments. These appeared to support the view that life originated 2.5 billion years ago in an oceanic environment with the creation of organic molecules. Hazen explains how Urey and his associates were able to re-create “primordial soup” in a simulation, which produced “a suite of biomolecules stunningly similar to what life actually uses.” That theory has been challenged in the last two decades, based on the discovery that life “fueled by chemical [rather than solar] energy” exists in extreme environments in astonishing abundance. Hazen and colleagues at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory (with support from NASA) have succeeded in simulating conditions that would have existed on Earth as early as 4.5 billion years ago, while producing biomolecules that are today the building blocks of life. The author situates this latest experimental evidence in a series of discoveries about the earth’s geological evolution, sparked by analysis of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts. A report of a fascinating new theory on the Earth’s origins written in a sparkling style with many personal touches.

DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, DAYS OF REVOLT

Hedges, Chris Illus. by Sacco, Joe Nation Books/Perseus (304 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 18, 2012 978-1-56858-643-4

An unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed. In the proud populist tradition of Howard Zinn (whose A People’s History of the United States provides a foundation for this book), a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a renowned |

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WILD

Strayed, Cheryl Knopf (336 pp.) $25.95 March 20, 2012 978-0-207-59273-6

Cheryl Strayed, it’s safe to say, won’t forget 2012 anytime soon. On Valentine’s Day, she revealed that she is the author of the empathetic, quirky Dear Sugar advice column on The Rumpus; soon afterwards, Vintage announced they’d be publishing a collection of her columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, in July. Strayed’s best-selling memoir Wild, about the meaning she plucked from hiking the unforgiving Pacific Crest Trail after the self-inflicted dissolution of her marriage, the death of her mother, and her bout with heroin, was published in March. In June, the book was chosen as the inaugural selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. And, oh yeah, her first novel, Torch, was reissued this year. When I asked Strayed what this year has been like, she talked first about how “magnificent” it’s been, but a few minutes later, she confessed that 2012 has also been “incredibly, incredibly stressful… I haven’t stopped moving for months.” She sat down for a conversation with me in late October before she went onstage at the Texas Book Festival (where I used to be the program director). It’s comforting to know that despite the A-list treatment she can demand given her success, when it came time for her to sign books, she didn’t pull any diva tricks out of her hat, dictating that she’d sign only with a certain style of pen (as some other writers have been known to do). Instead, she did what the readers of Wild, who admire her for her pragmatic self-reliance, would expect her to do: She matter-offactly pulled some pens out of her purse and signed books, even though no one would bat an eye if Cheryl Strayed asked them to find her a pen. Q: What has this year been like for you? A: I guess one of the most striking things for me is how many people have told me, “Your book means so much to me.” There has not been a day since March that I haven’t been told by at least 10 people via email or in person that my book changed their life. And sometimes that was Wild and sometimes that was Tiny, Beautiful Things. And then, every once in a while, I’ll meet somebody who says “I’ve read all your books and Torch is my favorite one”—I have a special place in my heart for those who favor my first book. And that’s a really profound experience, to have that many people every day say, “Your book changed my life.” And that feels like the greatest gift that any writer could receive, right?

is published. I’m not scared about writing that next book because I know that I’m going to go into that deep place that I go to when I write, and I’m going to do my very best work. Will that work be a book that strikes a chord in the way that Wild has? I have absolutely no idea and I also have absolutely no control over that. I didn’t try to write a best-seller. I had no idea that this story about my hike and my grief would resonate with so many people. When people talk to me about my book, they say, “I loved Wild and here’s why,” and they go on about their own lives, and what’s happening is that they’re recognizing themselves in my work, in my life. So many people have said, “We have so much in common.” They say, “We have parallel lives.” How can that be? And maybe the answer to that is, we’re all human, and there’s a universal experience, and the writer’s role and task here is to be the truth-teller, the storyteller. So the next book will be satisfying to some people and not satisfying to others. What I’ve found is that you have to actually detach yourself from thinking too much about who’s going to be pleased by any given work. Q: What is the next book going to be about? A: I have two books in my head. In some ways, Wild is a coming-of-age tale—it’s not the first coming-of-age when you’re in your teens, but it’s that real comingof-age when you’re in your mid-20s, when you have to actually grow up. And so this next memoir, it’s that 30s coming-of-age when I got married and had kids. So I want to write about those more recent years, what happened after Wild. The memoir that I have in my head is called Daughterland. The novel is called Pax— it’s about these four characters, set over the course of one year, starting on the winter solstice December 21, 2011, and ending on the winter solstice December 21, 2012, which is the date that according to the Mayans is the end of the world, but I’ll be interpreting that more metaphorically. It’s going to follow these four characters over this year as essentially, their lives end as they know it, and they have to come to grips with different things. I’ve always talked about Torch and Wild in the context of my mom’s death and say that the world I knew changed the day my mother died. So much of that journey has been figuring out how to be in the world without my mom. Pax, I’m happy to report, doesn’t have any dead mothers. —By Claiborne Smith p hoto © J oni C a b ana

Q: But isn’t there a certain amount of pressure for the next book, all the people you have to satisfy the next time around? A: I don’t have to satisfy them. I don’t. I don’t feel pressure; I know that it seems like I should, and I’m sure that I’ll completely freak out before the book 18

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“A jovially combative riposte to anyone who thought that death would silence master controversialist Hitchens.” from Mortality

cartoonist combine their talents for an illumination of the American underbelly, as the exploitation of a perpetual (and growing) underclass makes the “sacrifice zones” of global capitalism seem like Dante’s circles of hell. Truthdig columnist Hedges (Death of the Liberal Class, 2010) was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and other newspapers, though he plainly feels that advocacy can come closer to the truth than what passes for journalistic objectivity. Sacco (Journalism, 2012, etc.) shared the American Book Award for Palestine (2002) and has subsequently earned considerable acclaim for his graphic narratives of war zones. Though the team has plenty of experience with international warfare, the war they document here is in America, where “[c]orporate capitalism will, quite literally, kill us, as it has killed Native Americans, African Americans trapped in our internal colonies in the inner cities, those left behind in the devastated coalfields, and those who live as serfs in our nation’s produce fields.” Through immersion reportage and graphic narrative, the duo illuminate the human and environmental devastation in those communities, with the warning that no one is immune. “The ruthless hunt for profit creates a world where everything and everyone is expendable…it has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state,” writes Hedges. “These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.” While finding some surprising pockets of hope within communities that are otherwise steeped in despair, the pair reserve their concluding glimmer of optimism for the Occupy movement. Otherwise, they find no hope in politics as usual, depicting Democrats and Republicans as equally complicit in policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many. A call for a new American revolution, passionately proclaimed.

MORTALITY

Hitchens, Christopher Twelve (128 pp.) $22.99 | $12.99 e-book | CD $24.98 Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4555-0275-2 978-1-4555-1782-4 e-book 978-1-61969-188-9 CD A jovially combative riposte to anyone who thought that death would silence master controversialist Hitchens

(Hitch-22, 2010, etc.). Even as he lay—or sat or paced—dying in the unfamiliar confines of a hospital last year, the author had plenty to say about matters of life and death. Here, in pieces published in Vanity Fair to which are added rough notes and apothegms left behind in manuscript, Hitchens gives the strongest possible sense of his exhausting battle against the aggressive cancer spreading through his body. He waged that battle with customary sardonic good humor, calling the medical-industrial world into which he had been thrust “Tumortown.” More arrestingly, Hitchens conceived of the move from life to death as a sudden relocation, even a deportation, into another land: “The country |

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has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to.” One such gesture was the physician’s plunging of fingers into the neck to gauge whether a cancer had spread into the lymph nodes, but others were more subtle, including the hushed tones and reverences that came with the business. Hitchens, famously an atheist, visited the question of whether he should take Pascal’s wager and bet on God, concluding in the negative even as good Godfearing citizens filled his inbox with assurances that God was punishing him for his blasphemies with throat cancer. A reasonable thought, Hitchens concludes, though since he’s a writer, wouldn’t such a God have afflicted his hands first? Certainly, Hitchens died too soon. May this moving little visit to his hospital room not be the last word from him.

MARVEL COMICS The Untold Story

Howe, Sean Harper/HarperCollins (496 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 9, 2012 978-0-06-199210-0

An impeccably researched, authoritative history of Marvel Comics. Former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe (editor: Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, 2004) interviewed more than 150 former Marvel employees, freelancers and family members to weave together a tapestry of creative genius, bad business decisions and petty back-stabbing. Progenitors of Spider-Man, the Avengers and the X-Men, Marvel’s rocky road to merchandising success is as epic as any of the company’s four-color adventures. Howe pulls no punches as he details the fledgling enterprise’s slow rise from Timely Publications in 1939 to its official emergence as Marvel Comics in 1961, when the groundbreaking brilliance of writer Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko led to the creation of the company’s most iconic characters. In an era before movie-making technology facilitated lucrative cross-merchandising, however, Marvel struggled financially while its editors massaged the bruised egos of freelancers who poured their lifeblood into creations in which they didn’t retain an ownership stake. Kirby, bitter over what he perceived as Lee’s efforts to take undue credit for his stories, ultimately left, becoming a rallying point in the struggle for the rights and compensation of writers and artists. Lee relocated to Hollywood in an effort to bring Marvel’s characters to the big screen, a frustrating endeavor that would take decades and a procession of other individuals to come to fruition. Compared to the thorough account of Marvel’s formative years, Howe gives relatively short shrift to recent corporate machinations—including only a brief mention of Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Marvel in 2009—and the work of current superstars, but that’s a minor quibble in what is otherwise a |

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

FULL BODY BURDEN Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

nuanced and engrossing narrative of a company whose story deserves its own blockbuster film. Brilliantly juxtaposes Marvel with its best characters: flawed and imperfect, but capable of achieving miraculous feats.

LIVING, THINKING, LOOKING Essays

Hustvedt, Siri Picador (400 pp.) $18.00 paperback | Jun. 5, 2012 978-1-250-00952-4 Another superb essay collection from novelist Hustvedt (The Summer without Men, 2011, etc.). As in her previous collections, Yonder (1998) and A Plea for Eros (2006), the author trains a formidable intellect on difficult subjects (the structure of the brain, the nature of perception) with an engaging personal touch that invites a general readership. In “Excursions to the Islands of the Happy Few,” though she acknowledges the need for specialized vocabulary and research, she regrets the “culture of hyperfocus and expertise” in which “people inhabit disciplinary islands of the like-educated and the like-minded.” Hustvedt, by contrast, has a doctorate in English literature, has written extensively about art and has lectured at neuroscience conferences and at the Sigmund Freud Foundation. The categories invoked in her title—personal essays (Living), intellectual puzzles (Thinking), investigations of art (Looking)—indicate her broad scope; their underlying unity rests on Hustvedt’s consuming interest in connections: between emotion and intellect, memory and imagination, mother and child, artist and audience. Embodied, employed both as a verb and adjective, is a favored word, and it’s no accident that she mentions several times a 1996 neuroscience paper that identified certain “mirror neurons” that fire in the cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys performing a specific physical action and that also fire in monkeys observing the action. She is fascinated by the link between what we do and what we see and by the noncorporeal but nonimaginary spaces where human beings interact emotionally and intellectually. Frequent anecdotes about her extended family and her childhood illustrate her points and lower the intimidation factor; Hustvedt addresses a broad public without dumbing down her material. There are no weak essays here, but some of the best concern art, particularly those on Goya and Louise Bourgeois, whose work provides particularly fertile soil for Hustvedt’s exploration of the “electrical connection [that] takes place between the viewer and the image seen.” At once stimulating and warmhearted, with sentences of drop-dead beauty and acuity on nearly every page.

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

Iversen, Kristen Crown (432 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 5, 2012 978-0-307-95563-0

A harrowing account of Colorado’s Rocky Flats plutonium plant by a woman who grew up nearby. In 1951, in a cow pasture outside Denver, the U.S. government broke ground for a secret Cold War nuclear weapons facility that would manufacture plutonium triggers for atomic bombs. Owned by the Atomic Energy Commission, the plant produced more than 70,000 fissionable triggers and considerable radioactive and toxic waste. Iversen (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis; Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, 1999) grew up in a new suburban development three miles from the plant, totally unaware—like her family’s neighbors—of what went on there. In a gripping narrative that intersperses stories of the Rocky Flats plant and her family life, the author describes how an astonishing habit of silence flourished in the community, which would not permit suspicions about the cluster of gray concrete buildings to shatter its idyllic 1950s suburban innocence. The same silence reigned at home, where Iversen and her siblings were expected to overlook their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s pill popping. In 1969, after a second plutonium fire, the AEC admitted that Rocky Flats worked with plutonium but claimed this posed no threat to the public, a position the government maintained for years. This exquisitely researched book details official efforts to hide the plant’s toxic dangers; health researchers’ efforts to expose a rising incidence of cancer deaths; massive protests involving Daniel Ellsberg and others aimed at closing the plant; the 1989 joint FBI-EPA investigation of environmental crimes at Rocky Flats; and local residents’ later tumultuous class-action court battle. In 1990, Iversen took a secretarial job at the plant and began gathering information for this extraordinary book. “Nearly every family we grew up with has been affected by cancer in some way,” she writes. In 2007, after a cleanup, most of Rocky Flats was set aside for use as a wildlife refuge. Superbly crafted tale of Cold War America’s dark underside.

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“A transformative work that joins the hands of Art and Science and makes them acknowledge their close kinship.” from the age of insight

THE VOICE IS ALL The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac Johnson, Joyce Viking (512 pp.) $32.95 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-670-02510-7

An exemplary biography of the Beat icon and his development as a writer. With unprecedented access to the New York Public Library’s extensive Berg Collection of Kerouac artifacts, Johnson (Missing Men, 2005, etc.) tells the familiar story of the rise of the reluctant “king of the Beats” through the unfamiliar lens of his notebooks, manuscripts and correspondence with family, friends, lovers, editors and writers. The collection was unavailable to scholars for three decades, and access to it is still tightly controlled by the Kerouac estate. Johnson uses her opportunity as a pioneer in this new era of Kerouac scholarship to turn a laser-sharp focus on Kerouac’s evolving ideas about language, fiction vs. truth and the role of the writer in his time. She ends her chronology in late 1951, as Kerouac found the voice and method he’d employ for the rest of his brief career while seeking a publisher for On the Road and working on the novel he considered his masterpiece, Visions of Cody. While still detailing the chaotic and occasionally tragic events of the writer’s life—from mill-town football hero to multiply divorced dipsomaniac mama’s boy/cult idol—Johnson’s focus allows her to trace a trajectory of success rather than follow his painfully familiar decline into alcoholism and premature death. “[T]o me,” she writes, “what is important is Jack’s triumph in arriving at the voice that matched his vision.” Of perhaps most interest was her discovery of just how important his French-Canadian heritage was to Kerouac’s sense of identity. He considered its earthy patois his native language and seems to have translated his thoughts from it into the muscular English with which he’s associated. There’s plenty of life in these pages to fascinate casual readers, and Johnson is a sensitive but admirably objective biographer. A triumph of scholarship.

THE AGE OF INSIGHT The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present Kandel, Eric Random House (448 pp.) $40.00 | Mar. 27, 2012 978-1-4000-6871-5

In a polymathic performance, a Nobel laureate weaves together the theories and practices of neuroscience, art and psychology to show how our creative brains perceive and engage art—and are consequently moved by it. |

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Kandel (Biochemistry and Biophysics/Columbia Univ. College of Physicians; In Search of Memory, 2006, etc.) is uniquely equipped for this vast task. Born in Vienna, a collector of Klimt and Kokoschka, a scientist of the first rank, the author possesses in abundance the myriad requirements for such an integrative enterprise. Moving seamlessly and effortlessly between the worlds of art and science, Kandel begins with a look at the art world of Vienna, 1900. Then it’s off to Freud, whose theories and discoveries the author treats with great respect, awarding credit where it’s due, noting but not condemning errors. Kandel also glances at innovations in literature, especially the technique of interior monologue pioneered by Arthur Schnitzler in his Lieutenant Gustl (1900). Some sexy chapters ensue as Kandel discusses sexuality in art, and sex remains a leitmotif. He looks at how painters reveal the interior states of their subjects, and he examines the theories and discoveries of neuroscientists—though he continually returns to the art world for illustration, elaboration and example. Kandel reminds us that the brain creates the world for us: Our poor eyes bring in only a fraction of what’s there; the brain assembles and interprets, using memory as a principal guide. Readers will also learn how artists can make a subject’s eyes seem to follow the viewer, how scientists have used animals and imaging to explore the brain, and how artists employ models’ faces, hands and attitude to affect us, to prompt our empathy. In addition, Kandel investigates the nature of creativity. A transformative work that joins the hands of Art and Science and makes them acknowledge their close kinship.

THE VIOLINIST’S THUMB And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code Kean, Sam Little, Brown (400 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-316-18231-7

Science writer Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, 2010) returns with another wide-ranging, entertaining look at science history, this time focusing on the many mysteries of DNA. The author examines numerous discoveries in more than a century of DNA and genetics research, including such familiar touchstones as Gregor Mendel’s pea-plant experiments and the double-helix model of Watson and Crick. Kean also explores less-well-known territory, deftly using his stories as jumpingoff points to unpack specific scientific concepts. He discusses how DNA discoveries led not only to medical breakthroughs, but also to new ways of looking at the past; they “remade the very study of human beings.” Kean delves into theories regarding possible genetic diseases of Charles Darwin, French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and ancient Egyptian king Tut, among others, and how their ailments may have subtly affected |

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

developments in scientific, artistic and even royal history. Some stories edge into more bizarre areas, such as one Soviet scientist’s dream to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid, but Kean also tells the moving story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, “perhaps the most unlucky man of the twentieth century,” who was near both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 when the nuclear bombs were dropped—and who, despite almost certainly suffering DNA damage from radiation, lived into his 90s. At his best, Kean brings relatively obscure historical figures to life—particularly Niccolò Paganini, the titular violinist who wowed early-19thcentury audiences with his virtuosity, aided by finger flexibility that may have been due to the genetic disease Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Kean’s talent also shines in the sections on scientific rivalries, such as that between biologist Craig Venter’s private company Celera and the government-funded Human Genome Project, both of which are racing to sequence all human DNA. In an impressive narrative, the author renders esoteric DNA concepts accessible to lay readers.

LEONARDO AND THE LAST SUPPER

King, Ross Walker (320 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 1, 2012 978-0-8027-1705-4

An absorbing study of a disappearing masterpiece. King (Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, 2010, etc.) tells the story of the most famous painting no one has really seen, at least since the 16th century: The Last Supper, the masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci that began deteriorating almost as soon as the paint dried. King places the painting in its political, social and artistic context, describing both the meaning of da Vinci’s work and the violent 15thcentury Italian world that spawned it. Proof that art, like life, sometimes happens when you’re making other plans, da Vinci’s greatest painting came about because his dream project—an enormous horse-and-rider sculpture honoring the father of his patron, Lodovico Sforza—was scuttled when Italy needed the bronze for war. For the next two years, da Vinci painted the scene of Jesus and his disciples on the wall of a monastery. In its masterful use of perspective, complementary color and achievement of lifelike detail, it marked a turning point for Western art. King plumbs the painting’s religious, secular, psychological and political meanings, registered in the facial expressions and hand positions, the significance of the food on the table and, most fascinatingly, the salt spilled by the betraying Judas. (And no, Dan Brown, Mary Magdalene is not in it.) Alas, da Vinci’s ignorance of the fresco technique meant the pigments did not bond to the plaster, and the paint would begin flaking within years. As early as 1582, it was described as being “in a state of total ruin.” Thankfully, King’s book is an impressive work of restoration—the author helps readers see this painting for the first time. 22

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FIRE IN THE ASHES Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America Kozol, Jonathan Crown (368 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4000-5246-2

The award-winning author of Death at an Early Age (1967) tells the stories of the later lives of poor children who grew

up in the Bronx. Kozol (Letters to a Young Teacher, 2007, etc.) has worked with children in inner-city schools for 50 years. In this engaging, illuminating, often moving book, he recounts the lives of poor black and Latino children—many now close friends—who once lived in Manhattan’s Martinique Hotel and were relocated in the late 1980s, upon the closing of that crowded and filthy shelter, to Mott Haven, a poor Bronx neighborhood. As the children grew into young adulthood, Kozol kept in touch with them and their families through visits, emails and phone calls. In a series of intimate portraits, he describes the astonishing odds the children faced and how many managed, with the critical help of mentors and caring others, to achieve successful lives, both in the conventional sense of graduating from college, but above all, by becoming kind and loving human beings. There is Leonardo, recruited by a New England boarding school, where he emerged as a leader; the introspective Jeremy, who befriended a Puerto Rican poet, got through college and took a job at a Mott Haven church that is central to the lives of many; and the buoyant, winning Pineapple, whose Guatemalan parents provide the emotional security of a warm home. “I’m going to give a good life to my children,” says Lisette, 24, after her troubled brother’s suicide. “I have to do it. I’m the one who made it through.” Some children are still struggling to find their way, writes the author, but they do so with “the earnestness and elemental kindness” that he first saw in them years ago. Cleareyed, compassionate and hopeful.

THE PATAGONIAN HARE A Memoir

Lanzmann, Claude Translated by Wynne, Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux (496 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-374-23004-3

Love and death go hand in hand in the life of journalist and filmmaker Lanzmann, who at 84 delivers his first book (originally published in France in 2009): a beautifully written memoir driven by both the writer’s passion for living and his memories of lost friends. Raised as a secular Jew in a family with deep communist nonfiction

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“A superb examination of the never-ending effort to enhance life, as well as the commensurate refusal to ever let it go.” from the mansion of happiness

sympathies—and an unusual parental arrangement that included his mother’s lover—the author served in the French Resistance and narrowly missed capture by the Nazis. As an adult, he went where the action was, culturally and romantically. He became editor of Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Le Temps Modernes (a position he still holds more than 50 years later) and had an intense seven-year affair with Sartre’s lover, Simone de Beauvoir, who was happy to take him on as her “sixth man.” Faithfulness wasn’t anyone’s game then, and Lanzmann seemed to seduce nearly every woman he ever met. He also became deeply immersed in his own Jewish heritage and documentary filmmaking, ultimately resulting in his nine-hour magnum opus Shoah. Readers who have seen that great film will be especially interested in the last 100 pages, where he describes the making of it in exciting detail. Lanzmann is hardly a modest witness to his life, variously describing himself as a man of “phenomenal” endurance, a “fearless skier” and a “visionary,” but he’s equally generous to the memory of others. He renders beautiful if often painful memories of the departed: his beautiful and troubled sister, actress Evelyne Rey (one of Sartre’s many conquests), philosopher Gilles Deleuze, radical Frantz Fanon and his wife, Josie (all but Fanon, who died of leukemia, committed suicide). Lanzmann’s life has been a precarious balance between rich and poor, right and left, joy and fragility. “I am neither indifferent to, nor weary of, this world; had I a hundred lives, I know I would not tire of it,” he writes. Intelligent readers will find it hard to argue.

THE MANSION OF HAPPINESS A History of Life and Death Lepore, Jill Knopf (304 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 7, 2012 978-0-307-59299-6

A sharp, illuminating history of ideas showing how America has wrestled with birth, childhood, work, marriage, old age

and death. Brilliantly written and engaging throughout, the latest from New Yorker staff writer Lepore (American History/Harvard Univ.; The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History, 2011, etc.) is about how American society reacts to change. The author starts with the perfect metaphor: In 1860, a young entrepreneur named Milton Bradley created a popular board game called Life. The game had long existed in earlier versions, but Bradley gave it a capitalist spin, changing it from a game of good versus evil to one that “rewards only those virtues that lead to Wealth and Success, like Industry and Perseverance.” From there, Lepore tackles conception and how the famous pictures of a fetus in Life in the mid ’60s fostered the relatively modern idea of “being unborn as a stage of human life, a stage that was never on any board game.” The author shows how E.B. White’s surprisingly controversial novel |

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Stuart Little created a small revolution in a country that has always worshipped childhood; she sees it as “an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture.” Lepore’s topics are broad, and they lead her into many interesting byways—e.g., how eugenics was once considered a perfectly progressive idea and how contraception once seemed to threaten society in ways even Rick Santorum has not imagined. She also considers the legacy of Karen Ann Quinlan, the brain-dead young woman whose case helped foment arguments for both the right to die and the right to life, and discusses her visit to the creepy laboratory of cryogenics founder Robert C.W. Ettinger. A superb examination of the never-ending effort to enhance life, as well as the commensurate refusal to ever let it go.

THE HOLY OR THE BROKEN Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah”

Light, Alan Atria (288 pp.) $25.00 | Dec. 4, 2012 978-1-4516-5784-5

Charting the remarkable journey of a modern musical classic, from obscurity

to ubiquity. Former Vibe and Spin editor Light’s (The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys, 2006) brisk, engrossing study of “Hallelujah” comes on the heels of Sylvie Simmons’ definitive Cohen biography, but this book is brilliantly revelatory on its own. The song, a beguiling, mysterious mix of the spiritual and the erotic with an incantatory chorus, originally appeared on the Canadian singer-songwriter’s 1984 album “Various Positions.” Cohen’s label, Columbia, refused to issue the album, and it appeared on an independent label; it failed to sell. But the song was kept alive by John Cale’s 1991 cover, augmented by new verses supplied by its author, and Jeff Buckley’s heavenly rendering of Cale’s text on his 1994 debut album “Grace.” That album also flopped commercially, but “Hallelujah” became the touchstone of Buckley’s posthumous reputation after his death. Light skillfully delineates the song’s genesis as a contemporary standard, through its emotionally potent use in a famous VH1 montage after 9/11, feature films like Shrek, a host of TV shows and televised sing-offs like American Idol. Though Cohen declined to be interviewed for the book, Light spoke with several of his key collaborators plus many of its interpreters, including k.d. lang, Rufus Wainwright, Bono and Jon Bon Jovi. He recounts how the tardy success of Cohen’s unheralded composition led to his latter-day critical and commercial renaissance: After his manager embezzled nearly $10 million from his accounts, Cohen returned to performing on the back of “Hallelujah” and reinstated himself with a rapturously received 2008-2010 world tour. In the meantime, the song had become |

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WHEN GOD TALKS BACK Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

a fixture of religious ceremonies, bar mitzvahs, weddings and memorial services. Light’s main point is that the song’s stirring melody, malleability and lyrical ambiguity made it a natural candidate for wide-scale popular adoration. A masterful work of critical journalism.

SAVAGE CONTINENT Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Lowe, Keith St. Martin’s (464 pp.) $30.00 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-250-00020-0

A breathtaking, numbing account of the physical and moral desolation that plagued Europe in the late 1940s. Drawing on recently opened Eastern European archives, Lowe (Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg 1943, 2007, etc.) presents a searing and comprehensive view of postwar Europe that calls into question the very nature of World War II. Europe in this era is often seen through a rosy mythology of liberated nations cheerfully coming together to begin the task of reconstruction. In fact, the story of this period “is firstly a story of the descent into anarchy.” Across this devastated, lawless continent, millions of displaced persons trudged on foot in search of vanished homes or safety, some voluntarily, some driven at bayonet point as part of the massive ethnic cleansing that engulfed Eastern Europe; all were generally unwelcome on arrival. Everyone was “hungry, bereaved and bitter about the years of suffering they had been made to endure—before they could be motivated to start rebuilding they needed time to vent their anger, to reflect and to mourn.” Vent they did. Hostilities ended with the defeat of Germany, but violence continued unabated as partisans and communities punished collaborators, terrorized and expelled ethnic minorities, and pursued with brutal enthusiasm the class wars and civil wars that had long bubbled just beneath the surface. Viewed in this light, the familiar Allies-Axis war appears as a simplistic cover for the far more complicated and vicious local conflicts beneath. Lowe writes with measured objectivity, honoring the victims of atrocity and understanding the causes of, but refusing to excuse, the violence directed by freed victims against their former oppressors. Authoritative but never dry, stripping away soothing myths of national unity and victimhood, this is a painful but necessary historical task superbly done.

Luhrmann, T.M. Knopf (448 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 27, 2012 978-0-307-26479-4

A simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal analysis of evangelical communities in America. Luhrmann (Anthropology/Stanford Univ.; Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry, 2000) entered the Vineyard Christian Fellowship openly—declaring herself an anthropologist who wanted to understand the evangelical way and mind—and she was both welcomed and eventually somewhat transformed. Near the end, Lurhmann writes that although she’s not sure she’d call herself a Christian, she has “come to know God.” She begins by describing the current evangelical movement—how widespread it is, how God has become an intimate friend rather than a harsh judge and how evangelicals largely avoid theodicy. She sketches the history of the Vineyard and attributes to the 1960s counterculture some of the spiritual energy that animates the evangelical movement. As the title suggests, the author devotes much of her discussion to the conversation between believers and their God, a conversation facilitated by specific techniques of prayer. She spends many pages talking about the problem of hearing God’s voice and attempts to cover all bases. For example, she includes major passages about the long history of the phenomenon, schizophreniaand skeptics’ reservations and disdain. Lurhmann underwent extensive prayer training, and her research is substantial—years of commitment, countless interviews, extensive endnotes and a vast bibliography. She accords deep respect for those whose religious experiences are scientifically unverifiable, and she concludes that evangelicals have, to a great extent, reprogrammed their brains and that they and skeptics live in alternate universes. One topic she does not raise: the economics of the movement. Who’s getting rich in the evangelical world? Does it matter? An erudite discussion both profoundly sympathetic and richly analytical.

THE OLD WAYS A Journey on Foot

Macfarlane, Robert Viking (320 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 15, 2012 978-0-670-02511-4

Macfarlane (English/Cambridge Univ.; The Wild Places, 2008, etc.) returns with another masterful, poetic travel narrative.

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“In her hard-hitting debut, popular MSNBC host Maddow examines how the country has lost control of its national-security policy.” from drift

The author’s latest, focusing broadly on the concept of walking, forms what he calls “a loose trilogy,” with his two earlier books, Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, “about landscape and the human heart.” As in his previous books, it seems nearly impossible that a writer could combine so many disparate elements into one sensible narrative. It’s ostensibly a first-person travelogue (of England, Spain, Palestine, Tibet and other locales), combined with biographical sketches (such as that of poet Edward Thomas, who died on a battlefield in France in 1917) and historical anecdotes about a wide variety of subjects (e.g., a set of 5,000-year-old footprints made by a family along the coastline just north of Liverpool). In the hands of a lesser writer, these divergent ideas would almost certainly result in unreadable chaos, but Macfarlane effortlessly weaves them together under the overarching theme of “walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.” While this notion may seem abstract, the author’s resonant prose brings it to life— whether he is writing about the mountains of Tibet, where a half-frozen stream is “halted mid-leap in elaborate forms of yearning,” or the mountains of Scotland to which he returned for his grandfather’s funeral, where he found “moonlight shimmering off the pine needles and pooling in the tears of resin wept by the pines.” A breathtaking study of “walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape.”

DRIFT The Unmooring of American Military Power

Maddow, Rachel Crown (280 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-307-46098-1 978-0-307-46100-1 e-book

In her hard-hitting debut, popular MSNBC host Maddow examines how the country has lost control of its national-security policy. The author holds Dick Cheney, to whom the book is dedicated (“Oh please let me interview you”), responsible for much that has gone wrong, associating the former vice president with the presidential prerogative of war-making powers. Cheney, writes Maddow, had been nursing these ideas since his days as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and he elaborated on them in his minority report on congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. American forces are now accompanied by an equal or greater number of private contractors who perform functions that used to be reserved to the military, without either accountability or military control. The author shows how Bill Clinton used contractors extensively in Bosnia to avoid political fallout. These contractors, writes Maddow, typify the way in which the bonds that used to unite the military to the rest of society have been systematically severed, weakening political discussion and control. During the Vietnam War, Gen. |

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Creighton Abrams and others reformed the structure of the military to make going to war without calling up the reserves and the National Guard—thereby guaranteeing national debate—very difficult, but these checks and balances have broken down. Maddow documents how the budgetary element has also gone out of control and raises important questions about the safety of the nuclear arsenal. She grounds her argument in the Founding Fathers’ debates about going to war and how difficult they intended to make the process—a state of affairs that is opposite to what is represented now. With humor and verve, Maddow lays a solid basis for that hoped-for interview with Cheney (fingers crossed).

THE LAST LION Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

Manchester, William and Reid, Paul Little, Brown (1232 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 6, 2012 978-0-316-54770-3 A (very) posthumous study of the late, great British leader by the late, great popular historian, aided by journalist Reid. Just before Manchester (A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance—Portrait of an Age, 1992, etc.) died in 2004, he handed over the task of finishing his Churchill biography to Reid, who retains Manchester’s habit of writing at extreme length, and it’s clear where Manchester left off in his own primary research: Though the book spans the years 1940 to Churchill’s death in 1965, roughly only onetenth of it covers the “lion’s” last 20 years, while the vast bulk is given over—fittingly enough—to Churchill’s leadership as British prime minister during World War II. The documentation would not pass a professional historian’s muster, but Manchester never wrote for historians, and general readers, as always, will be taken by his boundless abilities as a storyteller. Manchester also saw patterns that may not have been apparent to most other writers. Whereas Hitler was famously known as an artist manqué, Churchill “came at every issue with a painter’s eye,” whether developing a battle plan for the invasion of Italy or “parsing geopolitical matters such as continental hegemony.” The great-man theory of history, too, may be passé in academia, but Manchester/Reid gladly subscribe to it, with an account of the friendship of Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt (and rivalry with Josef Stalin) that is both searching and unsentimental. The authors clearly admire Churchill, for reasons that they make evident throughout, but there is little in the way of hero worship. Indeed, their critical account of Operation Torch—which Dwight Eisenhower exaggeratedly called “the blackest day in history”—is thorough and convincing, and it does not reflect well on the cigar-chomping PM. The manuscript is replete with Manchester’s journalistic flourishes, some of which cross into cliché, and it’s as much a monument to the author as to its subject. |

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Essential for Manchester collectors, WWII buffs and Churchill completists. (32 pages of b/w photographs; 6 maps)

TWELVE PATIENTS Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

Manheimer, Eric Grand Central Publishing (272 pp.) $26.99 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-4555-0388-9 Captivating samplings of one doctor’s tour of duty inside the country’s oldest and perhaps most illustrious public hospital. As the “oldest hospital in the country,” New York’s famous Bellevue Hospital stands strong in the ashes of centuries of illness, death and, indeed, survival. Manheimer started his residency there in 1997, and each of these 12 vignettes coalesces into a humanitarian and heartbreaking tapestry where modern medicine confronts the atrocities of life. The profiles begin with the strife of incarcerated Mexican mobster Juan Guerra, admitted to the prison health unit with a neck swollen with cancerous tumors, the same type of carcinoma the author was battling at the same time. Other chapters introduce patients like Tanisha, a Dominican-Haitian teenager who was abandoned at birth and had ricocheted for years through an overburdened foster-care system; a recovering drug addict; an undocumented factory worker with a failing heart caused by debilitating Chagas disease; an obese woman requiring a C-section; and a homeless schizophrenic. As harrowing as the stories of the patients is the chronicle of Manheimer’s own arduous battle with cancer. Sampling three decades of the doctor’s tenure as medical director, the book offers desperate glimpses into the unfortunate lives of the sick, the injured and the dying, yet the author never relinquishes his hold on hope, however fleeting. Manheimer’s unflinching reportage of his patients, the country’s fractured health care system, irresponsible food manufacturers and hospital politics is authoritatively written, though not recommended for the medically squeamish. An exquisite—and often exquisitely depressing—patchwork of joy and pain.

HELLO, GORGEOUS Becoming Barbra Streisand

Mann, William J. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (592 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 9, 2012 978-0-547-36892-4 Hollywood chronicler Mann (How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, 2010, etc.) divulges the blood, sweat and tears that propelled a diva’s rise to stardom. 26

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Barbra Streisand is such a cultural institution that it sometimes seems as if she sprang fully grown from the head of the entertainment industry. Not so, argues the author in this surprisingly suspenseful and masterfully paced biography. Covering the fundamental years from 1960 to 1964, he shines the spotlight on an awkward yet ambitious teenage girl who aspired to play grand theatrical roles. To Streisand, singing came so easily that she didn’t regard it as work, and she practically had to be pushed into appearing at Greenwich Village nightclubs. When a friend suggested that she approach singing a song as if acting a part in a play, however, she made a creative breakthrough that led to appearances on TV talk shows, a Broadway role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale and a recording contract at Columbia Records. Streisand didn’t accomplish this alone, and Mann appropriately gives credit to the agents, accompanists, directors and mentors who brought her idiosyncratic style to a generation hungry for new idols. He also delves into her paradoxical mixture of self-confidence and -doubt, disclosing that she privately felt insecure about her looks despite publicly flaunting an outlandish flair for fashion and a loopy sense of humor. Mann structures the book by seasons, further dividing these into a series of vignettes that read like scenes from a novel peopled with extraordinary characters. Even though we know the answers to most of the questions—Will our heroine win the coveted role of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl? Will she live happily ever after with her Prince Charming, Elliott Gould?—this book makes getting to them a treat. (16-page and 8-page b/w inserts)

DESERT AMERICA Boom and Bust in the New “New West”

Martínez, Rubén Metropolitan/Henry Holt (352 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-8050-7977-7 A savage journey into terror, cacti, drugs, desperation and all-around anomie in the superheated atmosphere of the desert Southwest. Go east of Los Angeles 100 miles and you’re in downtown Tweakerville, an area full of meth labs, bad vibes and bad attitudes. The desert runs all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and Martínez (Literature and Writing/Loyola Marymount Univ.; Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, 2001, etc.) makes it his beat. The narrative begins in Albuquerque, a city that “cannot imagine itself a city because to do so would negate its reason for being.” It moves, subtly and without much fanfare, from the Southwest of the boom years, when the population of the region grew by 25 percent in just a decade, to the Southwest of today, a place of abandoned suburbs and forgotten hopes. Some of the ports of call are familiar—Joshua Tree, El Paso—and others not, but what sets Martínez’s journey apart is its philosophical underpinnings, the governing question being, “Who belongs here and who doesn’t?” By that reckoning, the adobe shacks, tattered nonfiction

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“A stellar biography of a complicated subject: Max’s portrait skillfully unites Wallace’s external and internal lives.” from every love story is a ghost story

palm trees and sun-bitten desert flats are all perfectly at home, whereas such things as the Santa Fe Opera, and most of Phoenix, and walls and fences that run parallel to the international line… well, not so much. As for the people, Martínez finds room for the likes of Mary Austin and Charles Lummis alongside the Native Americans and Latinos who have made the desert home for centuries. It is the latter people who are forgotten; toward the end of the book, for instance, the author quietly contrasts the wellheeled confines of Marfa, Texas, with the rest of Presidio County, half of whose people live in poverty. Less self-absorbed than Luis Alberto Urrea, less cynical than Charles Bowden, less otherly obsessed than William Vollmann—and right in the pocket, a necessary chronicle of a weird corner of America.

EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY A Life of David Foster Wallace

Max, D.T. Viking (336 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-670-02592-3

A thorough, understated account of the life of the pioneering author and how his addictions and fiction intersected. Before his suicide, David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) pursued a host of paths as a writer. He was a showy ironist who drafted his Pynchon-esque debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), while an undergraduate student at Amherst. He was a bright philosopher who wrote at length on Wittgenstein and infinity. He was a skilled (if not always factually rigorous) reporter who covered state fairs, politics and tennis with intelligence and style. But the biggest inspiration for his admirers was the compassion, wit and understanding of our media-soaked age that emerged in later novels like Infinite Jest (1996) and the posthumous The Pale King (2011). In this appropriately contemplative biography, New Yorker staff writer Max (The Family that Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, 2006) avoids overdramatizing climactic events in Wallace’s life, though it had plenty of emotional turmoil. Wallace was hospitalized for addiction and depression multiple times, and even at his steadiest he could collapse into rages. (Max chronicles in detail Wallace’s disastrous relationship with memoirist Mary Karr.) Max emphasizes the psychological tug of war within Wallace, who struggled to reconcile his suspicion of mass media with a habitual gulping down of hours of it; his high-minded pursuit of art with a need for emotional and sexual attention; and his resolve to blend entertaining fiction and dense philosophy. Max draws upon the rich trove of Wallace’s papers (he was an inveterate letter writer) and dozens of interviews, from Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors to literary contemporaries like Jonathan Franzen. Wallace’s family relationships get relatively short shrift, but it’s clear that under the veneer of a successful, brainy novelist was an eagerto-please native Midwesterner. |

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A stellar biography of a complicated subject: Max’s portrait skillfully unites Wallace’s external and internal lives.

THE HUNT FOR KSM Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed McDermott, Terry; Meyer, Josh Little, Brown (352 pp.) $27.99 | Mar. 26, 2012 978-0-316-18659-9

Superlative storytelling and crackling reportage define a pulse-pounding narrative tracing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. To this day, the bleary-eyed visage of the 9/11 mastermind being hauled off by authorities after a successful raid on his hideout in 2003 remains the most recognizable image of the hated international terrorist. McDermott (101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory, 2010, etc.) and Los Angeles Times chief terrorism reporter Meyer explode that superficial frame with a taut, espionage-thriller–like narrative. The authors render characters on both sides of the law—the hunters and the hunted alike—in rich detail, ably evoking their clear motives and desires. While Osama bin Laden became the main symbol of America’s war on terror, it was actually KSM who tirelessly traveled the globe recruiting young Muslim men for his ongoing war on the West, directing their actions, outfitting their operations and setting them loose upon an unsuspecting populace. FBI Special Agent Frank Pellegrino was on his heels from the very beginning, when, in 1993, KSM tried to destroy the World Trade Center with a truck bomb left in a tower garage. During that time, write the authors, none of Pellegrino’s superiors seemed interested in his investigations, but ultimately, a decadelong game of cat-and-mouse ensued, marked largely by frustration, futility and missed opportunities. A surprising, sobering look at one of the deadliest terror networks in history and the American spy agencies charged with bringing it down.

THOMAS JEFFERSON The Art of Power Meacham, Jon Random House (800 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 13, 2012 978-1-4000-6766-4 978-0-679-64536-8 e-book

A Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer lauds the political genius of Thomas Jefferson. As a citizen, Jefferson became a central leader in America’s rebellion against the world’s greatest empire. As a diplomat, he mentored a similar revolution in France. As president, he doubled the size of |

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the United States without firing a shot and established a political dynasty that stretched over four decades. These achievements and many more, Time contributing editor Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, 2008, etc.) smoothly argues, would have been impossible if the endlessly complicated Jefferson were merely the dreamy, impractical philosopher king his detractors imagined. His portrait of our most enigmatic president intentionally highlights career episodes that illustrate Jefferson’s penchant for balancing competing interests and for compromises that, nevertheless, advanced his own political goals. Born to the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson effectively disguised his drive for control, charming foes and enlisting allies to conduct battles on his behalf. As he accumulated power, he exercised it ruthlessly, often deviating from the ideals of limited government he had previously—and eternally—articulated. Stronger than any commitment to abstract principle, the impulse for pragmatic political maneuvering, Meacham insists, always predominated. With an insatiable hunger for information, a talent for improvisation and a desire for greatness, Jefferson coolly calculated political realities—see his midlife abandonment of any effort to abolish slavery—and, more frequently than not, emerged from struggles with opponents routed and his own authority enhanced. Through his thinking and writing, we’ve long appreciated Jefferson’s lifelong devotion to “the survival and success of democratic republicanism in America,” but Meacham’s treatment reminds us of the flesh-and-blood politician, the man of action who masterfully bent the real world in the direction of his ideals. An outstanding biography that reveals an overlooked steeliness at Jefferson’s core that accounts for so much of his political success.

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture

Mendelsohn, Daniel New York Review Books (432 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 16, 2012 978-1-59017-607-8 978-1-59017-609-2 e-book Another top-notch collection of previously published criticism from Mendelsohn (How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, 2008, etc.). “There rarely are any real ‘barbarians,’ ” the author writes. “What others might see as declines and falls look, when seen from the bird’s-eye vantage point of history, more like shifts, adaptations, reorganizations.” This long-range perspective distinguishes Mendelsohn’s criticism from that of less erudite and measured peers. The opening section, “Spectacles,” ranges from Avatar to Mad Men with refreshing matter-of-factness, pinpointing the cultural significance of commercial forms of art without over- or understating their merits. Mendelsohn’s analysis of why Julie Taymor was precisely the wrong director 28

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for the Broadway musical Spider-Man is particularly sharp. Mendelsohn’s assessments can be negative, even dismissive, but they are not overheated or personally nasty. The near-exception is “Boys Will Be Boys,” a severe going-over of Edmund White’s memoir City Boy (2009), and even that is less a slam than a forthright statement of the differences between two generations of gay writers. Although Mendelsohn mused at length on questions of homosexual identity in The Elusive Embrace (1999), his criticism reveals an openly gay writer comfortably connected to the culture at large. He is equally acute and balanced on the memoir craze, the pleasures of Leo Lerman’s journals and “the fundamental failure of genuine good humor” in Jonathan Franzen’s work. Mendelsohn’s tendency to announce that there is a single key insight that crucially explains a given artist’s work can be irritating, but often his insight is key: Susan Sontag’s affinity with French classicism, for example, or ultrasophisticate Noël Coward’s grounding in “the stolid values of the decidedly unsophisticated lower-middle-class.” Incisive, reflective and unfailingly stimulating. It wouldn’t hurt Mendelsohn to occasionally pass up an opportunity to remind readers he’s the smartest guy in the room, but then again, he almost always is.

ON CELESTIAL MUSIC And Other Adventures In Listening

Moody, Rick Back Bay/Little, Brown (384 pp.) $15.99 paperback | Mar. 21, 2012 978-0-316-10521-7

The acclaimed novelist shows off his considerable gifts for parsing music. Moody (The Four Fingers of Death, 2010, etc.) is also a musician of semipro status, with a couple of albums by his group, the Wingdale Community Singers, and a solo set under his belt. This collection of his writing about music for various journals is characterized by passion, inspired insight and a generous sampling of warm humor. The essays cover an astonishing amount of genre ground. Moody’s catholic tastes run the gamut from rock to left-field experimental sounds, and he’s a sensitive listener who almost always connects with the heart of the matter. He tackles the challenges of writing about the most fundamental of human emotions as he carves a playlist out of the Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs”; explores the expression of spirituality in the work of the evangelistic rock group the Danielson Famile; ponders what music in heaven might sound like in the title story, which springs off a live recording by Otis Redding; muses on the affect of the Pogues’ music, viewed through the prism of lead singer Shane McGowan’s alcoholism; and excoriates the soullessness of modern European pop in a tart and frequently hilarious jeremiad about the drum machine. Some chapters are less satisfying: Moody’s account of two weeks at a New York music camp is essentially a journal entry, while a survey of the fin de siècle New York underground reads like exactly what it is: a chapter nonfiction

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“Rapturously irreverent, this book should kick-start plenty of useful discussions.” from how to be a woman

from an as-yet-unpublished textbook. But most of the writing is acute and intensely wrought. It’s often highly personal stuff— Moody weaves his parents’ divorce, his struggles with alcohol and his performance experiences into the mix—but it never succumbs to the solipsism so prevalent in much latter-day rock criticism. For Moody, music is most of all about rapture, and he communicates his feelings with an ardor and intelligence all too rare in these waning days of music criticism. Thoughtful, heartfelt and frequently moving, like the best music.

CITY OF PROMISES A History of the Jews in New York Moore, Deborah Dash New York Univ. (1,050 pp.) $99.00 | Sep. 24, 2012 978-0-8147-1731-8

This ambitious three-volume history, overseen by Moore (Judaic Studies and History/Univ. of Michigan; American Jewish Identity Politics, 2008, etc.), provides a lively, much-needed overview of the role that Jews have played in the history and success of the Big Apple, helping to transform it into “a city of promises, some fulfilled, some pending, some beckoning new generations.” The first volume, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865, by Rock (History/Florida International Univ.; Cityscapes, 2001, etc.), traces the history of New York Jews back to the first Dutch Jews who settled in the New Amsterdam colony in the mid-17th century, where they fought for the rights to own real estate and run businesses. As the years went by, Jewishowned businesses prospered despite widespread anti-Semitism, as the city as a whole grew into an economic powerhouse. The volume also covers the rise of Reform Judaism and, later, disputes within the community regarding slavery. In Emerging Metropolis, New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920, Polland, the vice president of education for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue, 2008), and Soyer (History/Fordham Univ.) show how the influx of immigrant Jews from Europe changed the city, as Jewish organizations proliferated and the community began to make itself felt in city politics, journalism and the arts. In the third volume, Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010, Gurock (Jewish History/Yeshiva Univ.; Orthodox Jews in America, 2009, etc.) examines a range of engaging issues, including the community’s growth in Queens and suburbia, crises such as the 1991 Crown Heights riot, and Jewish feminism. Each volume also includes a vibrant photo- and illustration-packed “visual essay” by art historian Linden, which ably supplements and enriches the text. Such a large historical project could have easily descended into tedious and dry academia, but instead, all three volumes are briskly paced, well-researched and insightful. Aficionados of urban histories, in particular, will find much to enjoy. (Three-volume box set) |

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HOW TO BE A WOMAN

Moran, Caitlin Perennial/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $15.99 paperback | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-06-212429-6 A spirited memoir/manifesto that dares readers to “stand on a chair and shout ‘I AM A FEMINIST.’ ” With equal amounts snarky brio and righteous anger, Moran brings the discussion of contemporary women’s rights down from the ivory tower and into the mainstream. Although women have come a long way from the battles fought by the early suffragettes and the first-wave feminists of the 1960s and ’70s, they have also lost ground in some disturbing ways. Society still scrutinizes female sexual behavior for incipient signs of “sluttiness”; girls still grow up dreaming of becoming brides and wives (aka princesses), and pornography and strip clubs still objectify women. Moreover, celebrity culture puts women under a magnifying glass, dismissing their talents in favor of crowing over their physical flaws, their marital status and whether or not they have children. Into this sorry mess strides Moran, a self-deprecating, no-nonsense guide to womanhood. She frames her debate via a series of chapters detailing her own journey toward becoming not only a woman, but also a good person—polite, kind, funny and fundamentally decent. After all, feminism, she argues, is not a form of man hating; it is a celebration of women’s potential to effect change and an affirmation of their equality with men. That such an important topic is couched in ribald humor makes reading about Moran’s journey hilarious as well as provocative. With nary a hint of embarrassment, she reveals personal anecdotes about her miserable early adolescence as an overweight girl and her evolution into a music journalist who took London by storm on a quest to fall in love—or at least to kiss a lot of boys. She proves equally forthright in her views on abortion, childbearing and high heels. While some American readers may struggle with the British references and slang, they will find their efforts rewarded. Rapturously irreverent, this book should kick-start plenty of useful discussions.

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THIS LIVING HAND And Other Essays

Morris, Edmund Random House (512 pp.) $32.00 | Oct. 23, 2012 978-0-8129-9312-7 978-0-679-64466-8 e-book

A sterling collection of essays from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner. Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, in “what amounts to a scrapbook of one man’s literary life,” the book ranges widely in tone from the serious to the satirical. Several of the works have yet to be published, and a few have been revised or expanded. Morris (Colonel Roosevelt, 2010, etc.), who writes that he is haunted by visual images, occasionally pairs a pertinent illustration with an essay and when necessary, inserts a footnote to clarify an obsolete reference. “Outside of literature in general and biography in particular,” he writes, “my non-book work has consisted mainly of commentary on the presidency and writings about classical music.” Morris begins with a 1972 essay, “The Bumstich: Lament for a Forgotten Fruit,” in which he recounts his time as a schoolboy in Kenya. The author concludes with “The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography,” an exploration of the process of writing Dutch (1999), his controversial book about Ronald Reagan. This last essay is an updated revision of three seminars the author gave while serving as a writer in residence at the University of Chicago in 2003. In other pieces, Morris laments the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro; probes the psyche of South African writer Nadine Gordimer; explains his passion for writing biographies; narrates his tour through Britain’s Imperial War Museum; and bemoans the loss of the physical pleasure of writing with pen and ink or typewriter. “Parker man or Remington man,” he writes, “one felt a closeness to the finished product that the glass screen of a computer display now coldly precludes.” A splendid assemblage of significant work by one of our keenest observers.

THE PATRIARCH The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy Nasaw, David Penguin Press (896 pp.) $40.00 | Nov. 13, 2012 978-1594203763

Sprawling, highly readable biography of the dynast and larger-than-life figure whose presence still haunts American

political life. Working from his subject’s extensive archives, Nasaw (Andrew Carnegie, 2006, etc.) pieces together a 30

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sometimes-sympathetic, sometimes-critical view of Joseph P. Kennedy (1888–1969), father of John F. Kennedy and most definitely a man of parts. Born into wealth, he learned the ropes in the banking business before heading to Hollywood to try his hand at filmmaking. In the last pursuit, he charted only some successes, but he made great use of the perks of the job in bedding starlets, notably Gloria Swanson. Kennedy left Hollywood to return to finance, moving among several palatial homes in Florida, New York and Massachusetts and building a massive fortune thanks to what Nasaw calls “an almost uncanny knack for being in the right stock.” His children, including future politicians John, Robert and Edward, grew up surrounded by opulence, though the patriarch took care that they not become spoiled by too much too soon. Yet, by Nasaw’s account, when the Depression hit and reduced his fortune along with everyone else’s, Kennedy’s mood seemed to turn, and he spent the rest of his long life in brooding and contrarian turns, courting plenty of trouble along the way. Accused, as Nasaw notes, of various crimes and moral failings, ranging from bootlegging to antiSemitism, Kennedy nevertheless instilled in his family a sense of dedication to service and of the necessity of hard work. As he writes, Jack Kennedy recognized that despite the advantages of wealth, he had obstacles to overcome that were at least due in part to his father: “If I were governor of a large state, Protestant and 55,” he said, “I could sit back and let it come to me.” It did not, and nothing came easy to any of the Kennedys, that tragic clan, who continue to fascinate. Exhaustive yet accessible, Nasaw’s book illuminates.

MAO The Real Story

Pantsov, Alexander V.; Levine, Steven I. Simon & Schuster (736 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 2, 2012 978-1-4516-5447-9

A comprehensive, authoritative new study that challenges the received wisdom regarding Mao’s relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. With rare access to the newly consolidated Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Pantsov (History/ Capital Univ.; The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 19191927, 2000) and Levine construct an “up-to-date” take on the Chinese Communist Party and Mao’s rise in it as being essentially dictated by Stalin and financially supported by the Soviet Union through the 1950s. Stalin manipulated Mao to his own ends; only after Stalin’s death and Mao’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with Khrushchev did the Chinese pull away from the Soviet Union as part of an “emancipation of consciousness.” The authors’ detail is minute and the characters proliferate mind-bendingly, especially in the careful reconstruction of Mao’s rise from rube and community organizer to national leader. Pantsov and Levine depict Mao with all his conflicting facets, from the early bookworm and idealist who initially nonfiction

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“A fascinating addition to the study of decisionmaking. File alongside Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Ariely and other similar writers.” from wait

scorned the “stupidity” of the masses, to becoming the party’s self-made prophet on the agrarian question, espousing the proletarian confiscation of land from the landlords. He was a man of enormous energy and capacity for love who was nonetheless hardened by the intraparty struggle against Chiang Kai-shek; he was also a utopian socialist who embarked on the modernization scheme of the Great Leap Forward in 1957 after a stimulating trip to Moscow. The great famine that ensued did not dampen Mao’s enthusiasm for revolutionary incentives, as played out tragically in the Red Guards’ devastation, and his “irrepressible lust for violence” has been largely forgiven by history because he consolidated China’s “national liberation.” The Great Helmsman fully fleshed, still complicated and ever provocative. (16-page b/w insert)

WAIT The Art and Science of Delay Partnoy, Frank PublicAffairs (288 pp.) $26.99 | Jun. 26, 2012 978-1-61039-004-0

A leading expert on financial market regulation studies the virtues of delay and even inaction. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, Partnoy (Law and Finance/Univ. of San Diego; The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals, 2009, etc.) asked “why our leading bankers, regulators and others were so short-sighted and wreaked such havoc on our economy.” While there is a high premium today for speed, the author suggests that there are serious downsides to rapid decision-making, unless it is accompanied by long-term strategic thinking and planning. Partnoy’s interdisciplinary approach uses elements of behavioral economics, neuroscience and even sports, as he shows how professional tennis and baseball players give themselves the extra milliseconds needed to process the trajectory of a ball before responding. Good judgment depends on allowing enough time for necessary mental processing to occur. The decision may appear to be spontaneous, but prior experience is almost always a factor—whether it occurs preconsciously, in milliseconds, or consciously, in seconds or longer time frames. Partnoy’s results are groundbreaking and a potential corrective to modern pressures for rapid response, whether on the playing field, in high-speed computer trading and corporate boardrooms, or on the battlefield. The author argues that although circumstances vary—each having its own requirements—and one size does not fit all, society must foster long-term decision-making in addition to making time for better shorter-term efforts. A fascinating addition to the study of decision-making. File alongside Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Ariely and other similar writers.

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SWORD OF THE SPIRIT, SHIELD OF FAITH Religion in American War and Diplomacy

Preston, Andrew Knopf (832 pp.) $37.50 | Feb. 28, 2012 978-1-4000-4323-1

A sharp, clear, deeply researched examination of the consistent application of the founding religious principles to American foreign policy, from the colonists’ sense of a Protestant exceptionalism to President Barack Obama’s “Good Niebuhr Policy.” The invocation of God and religion to sanctify foreignpolicy decisions is not a new or surprising idea, as Preston (American and International History/Cambridge Univ.) learned especially when he was researching his work on McGeorge Bundy and the Vietnam War (The War Council, 2006). However, the extent to which religion has been used consistently to shape U.S. diplomatic history proved “an odd and unsettling discovery.” Here the author thoroughly documents that discovery, from the self-righteous Puritans’ establishing their “City upon a Hill” to the modern-day presidents acting as self-appointed popes. Preston explores this fascinating paradox of a nation founded on freedom of religion yet exhibiting, in its relations with the wider world, a profound belief in a Judeo-Christian sense of “exceptional virtue.” America’s unique geographical position in the world allowed it “free security” to engender idealistic choices and values, reflected in its moralistic foreign policy. Its founding Reformation Protestant society eventually developed tenets of pluralism, libertarianism, a deep suspicion of despotism and hostility to arbitrary power, a faith-based progressivism, nationalism and even isolationism, all of which Preston explores systematically. America’s reaction to what it perceived as corrupt and tyrannical foreign influences thus allowed the republic to model itself as virtuous and in the right, spreading “God’s own cause” in subsequent dealings with the Indians, Canadians, Mexicans, Cubans and Filipinos, largely for worse. Preston sifts carefully through the “religious biographies” of certain key policymakers, including John Quincy Adams, William McKinley, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Foster Dulles and others. A frank, exhaustive, marvelously readable study.

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SPILLOVER Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic Quammen, David Norton (480 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 1, 2012 978-0-393-06680-7

Nature writer and intrepid traveler Quammen (The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, 2006, etc.) sums up in one absorbing volume what we know about some of the world’s scariest scourges: Ebola, AIDS, pandemic influenza—and what we can do to thwart the “NBO,” the Next Big One. The author discusses zoonoses, infectious diseases that originate in animals and spread to humans. The technical term is “spillover.” It’s likely that all infections began as spillovers. Some, like Ebola and lesser-known viral diseases (Nipah, Hendra, Marburg), are highly transmissible and virulent, but so far have been limited to sporadic outbreaks. They persist because they are endemic in a reservoir population through a process of mutual adaptation. Finding that reservoir holds the key to control and prevention and gives Quammen’s accounts the thrill of the chase and the derring-do of field research in rain forests and jungles and even teeming Asian cities where monkeys run wild. The author chronicles his travels around the world, including a stop in a bat cave in Uganda with scientists who found evidence that bats were the source of Marburg and other zoonoses, but not AIDS. Quammen’s AIDS narrative traces the origin of HIV to chimpanzee-human transmission around 1908, probably through blood-borne transmission involved in the killing of the animal for food. Over the decades, with changing sexual mores, an everincreasing world population and global travel, the stage was set for a takeoff. Quammen concludes with a timely discussion of bird flu, which has yet to achieve human-to-human transmission but, thanks to the rapid mutation rate and gene exchanges typical of RNA viruses, could be the NBO. You can’t predict, say the experts; what you can do is be alert, establish worldwide field stations to monitor and test and take precautions. A wonderful, eye-opening account of humans versus disease that deserves to share the shelf with such classics as Microbe Hunters and Rats, Lice and History.

SUBVERSIVES The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power

Rosenfeld, Seth Farrar, Straus and Giroux (720 pp.) $40.00 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-374-25700-2 A kaleidoscopic look at the FBI’s willingness to undermine American citizens during the 1960s.

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Former San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporter Rosenfeld explores the many ways in which J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI undermined the rights and especially the privacy of American citizens in his efforts to undercut the many protest movements that emerged at the University of California, Berkeley, in the ’60s. Hoover had long been concerned with events at one of the country’s greatest universities, and as the decade progressed, the FBI utilized increasingly devious cloak-and-dagger methods to address those concerns. In addition to Hoover, Rosenfeld focuses on other significant figures, interweaving their stories into his larger narrative. Mario Savio, the star-crossed leader of many of the student movements, drew much of Hoover’s ire. He also drew the ire of Ronald Reagan, an outspoken critic of the left in Berkeley who, upon assuming the governorship of California, created the perfect conditions for his friend and ally Hoover to step up his already pervasive investigations. Caught in between was Clark Kerr, the liberal and often-visionary president of the university who became a target of scorn from Savio and the student left as well as from Reagan, Hoover and the right. One of the subtexts of this masterfully researched book is Rosenfeld’s yearslong struggle to gain access to the relevant FBI documents, a fight that reveals the extent to which the FBI knew how explosive and embarrassing this story could be to the government. In an appendix, the author details that struggle, which “resulted in the release of the most extensive record of FBI activities concerning a university during J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure, and the most complete release of bureau records on Ronald Reagan.” A potent reminder of the explosiveness of 1960s politics and how far elements of the government were (and perhaps still are) willing to go to undermine civil liberties. (8 pages of b/w illustrations)

POWER, INC. the Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government—and the Reckoning that Lies Ahead

Rothkopf, David Farrar, Straus and Giroux (464 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-374-15128-7

Rothkopf (Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, 2009, etc.) uses a wide-angle lens to examine the relation between public and private power. The author compares various models of capitalist functioning for insight into their relative rates of success—the U.S. “government-lite” opposition to big government; China’s top-down state control; the more democratic “statist” version offered by India and Brazil; a European model, derived primarily from Sweden and Germany; and one based on such commercially successful small states as Israel, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Comparing models, the author separates successful economies from the near successful, the failing and the failed, and he compares countries and public institutions to the nonfiction

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“Aspects of a spy novel, a writer’s autobiography and a victim’s affidavit pulsing with resentment and fear combine to reveal a man’s dawning awareness of the primacy of freedom.” from joseph anton

private sector—Wal-Mart, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell and dozens of others. Rothkopf adds historical context with his account of one of the oldest companies in the world, Sweden’s Stora, which began as a mining venture in the 1200s and has endured under different names for centuries. Sweden and Stora’s mines were vital to the outcome of both the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, the concluding settlement of which signaled the victory of the nation-state. In Rothkopf ’s view, the world has shifted from a “battle between capitalism and Communism to something even more complex: a battle between differing forms of capitalism in which the distinction between each is in the relative role and responsibilities of public and private sectors.” The extremes of both Soviet communism and free-market financial “overreach” have been discredited. American capitalism initially triumphed but has receded, and competition between different capitalisms will continue. Rothkopf delivers a lively, accessible treatment of a multifaceted, complex subject.

JOSEPH ANTON A Memoir

Rushdie, Salman Random House (656 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-8129-9278-6 978-0-679-64388-3 e-book

The frightening, illuminating and disturbing memoir by the author of The Satanic Verses, the book that provoked a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie (Luka and the Fire of Life, 2008, etc.) chose for his cover name (and for the title) the first names of Conrad and Chekhov—appropriate, for the author seems caught in a tangled novel filled with ominous (and some cowardly) characters driven by an inscrutable fate toward a probable sanguinary climax. The author uses third person throughout, a decision that allows him a novelist’s distance but denies some of the intimacy of the first person. Perhaps he viewed himself during those 13 years (the duration of his protection by British security forces) more as a character than a free agent. He returns continually to an image from Hitchcock’s The Birds: the black birds gradually filling up a jungle gym on a school playground (these represent the threats to personal freedom presented by fundamentalists). Rushdie also includes unmailed letters to actual people (Tony Blair) and to ideas (the millennium). The organization is unremarkable: The author begins with his learning of the fatwa, retreats to tell about his life before 1989, then marches steadily toward the present with only a few returns (a section about his mother’s love life). Bluntly, he tells about his wives, divorces, affairs, successes and failures of pen and heart and character; his various security guards; and, very affectingly, about his two sons. He tells about his travels, many awards and celebrity friends. Emerging as heroic is the United States, where Rushdie realized he could live more freely than anywhere else. |

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Aspects of a spy novel, a writer’s autobiography and a victim’s affidavit pulsing with resentment and fear combine to reveal a man’s dawning awareness of the primacy of freedom.

ON POLITICS A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present Ryan, Alan Liveright/Norton (1120 pp.) $75.00 | Oct. 22, 2012 978-0-87140-465-7

An ambitious survey not of politics itself, but of the way Westerners have thought about politics for 2,500 years. Ryan (Politics/Princeton Univ.; John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 1997, etc.) has written a massive book, one “a long time in the making.” That’s understandable, for he has a tremendous amount of ground to cover. He does so with the admirable breadth of Will and Ariel Durant or Frederick Copleston but with much greater powers of concision and a gift for finding essences without resorting to essentialism. Thus, he writes, one critical difference between Athenian and Roman conceptions of freedom is that the former “practiced a form of unfiltered direct democracy that the Romans thought a recipe for chaos; the Romans gave ordinary free and male persons a role in politics, but a carefully structured and controlled one.” That distinction comes into play more than 900 pages later, when Ryan wrestles with what kind of a system most Western countries, and preeminently the United States, have today. “Liberal democracies,” he writes, are really “nontyrannical and liberal popular mixed republics,” though, as he cautions, “nobody is going to call them this.” In between, Ryan visits thinkers from Socrates and Plato to Aristotle, excusing Plato from charges of protofascism and marveling at Aquinas’ powers of distinction in determining whether it is fitting for a bishop to go to war. If all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then Ryan’s text is a delightful assemblage of enlightening subnotes: Who among us remembers that Machiavelli’s The Prince was on the Catholic Church’s forbidden index until just recently and “that anyone wishing to read it for the purposes of refutation had to ask permission of the pope”? That Edmund Burke was a boring public speaker, but “(mostly) wrote like an angel”? Or that Karl Marx’s notion of class struggle remains an elusive work in progress? Provocative, illuminating and entertaining—an exemplary work of philosophy and history whose author’s deep learning is lightly worn. (2-volume boxed hardcover)

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WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY The Moral Limits of Markets

Sandel, Michael J. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-374-20303-0

Sandel (Government/Harvard Univ.; Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, 2010, etc.) sounds the alarm that the belief in a market economy diminishes moral thought. Taken to its extreme, a market economy dictates that any inanimate object, any animal, any human being can be bought and sold. That thinking justified human slavery in the United States until the end of the Civil War, but Sandel’s examples are far subtler than slavery. Should any society find it desirable to place a price on polluting the environment? On firstrate health care? On admission to the best colleges? When so much is available for sale, writes the author, there are two inevitable negative consequences: inequality and corruption. Sandel devotes the first chapter to “Jumping the Queue.” He explains the conundrums that arise when first-class airline passengers are allowed to skip the long lines at security, when single-passenger cars purchase the right to use express lanes designed for fuel-efficient multiple-passenger vehicles, when theatergoers pay somebody to stand in line overnight to score tickets for the best seats and when long waits for medical treatment at hospitals are circumvented by buying the services of concierge doctors, who guarantee quick access. Although not primarily a quantitative researcher, Sandel tests the boundaries of a market economy in his Harvard seminar on Ethics, Economics and the Law. The reactions of his students provide him with new examples of moral (or immoral or amoral) reasoning about everyday decision-making in an economy where cash payments rule. Sandel notes that the reality of a market economy embeds a vital question: How do members of the citizenry choose the values by which they will conduct their daily living? Are there certain commodities that markets should not honor? An exquisitely reasoned, skillfully written treatise on big issues of everyday life.

ERNIE K-DOE The R&B Emperor of New Orleans

Sandmel, Ben The Historic New Orleans Collection (304 pp.) $39.95 | Apr. 11, 2012 978-0-917860-60-7

A vital, loving chronicle of the colorful life and frequently hard times of the New Orleans R&B singer and self-styled “Emperor of the Universe.” 34

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To many, Ernie K-Doe (1936–2001) is a one-hit wonder: His evergreen oldie “Mother-in-Law” topped the pop and R&B charts in 1961. But to New Orleans journalist Sandmel (Zydeco!, 1999), the vocalist was much more, and this smart, funny and richly designed and illustrated book makes a rousing case for the musician as a quintessential Crescent City figure. Born Ernest Kador Jr. in the city’s Charity Hospital, K-Doe authored his hit single and other lively R&B tracks for local Minit Records, but a follow-up smash proved elusive. While he maintained a hometown profile as a hardworking performer in the James Brown/Joe Tex mold, K-Doe was best known for years as a DJ on New Orleans’ WWOZ. There, his lunatic manner, unique lexicon and stream-of-consciousness raps cemented his status as a NoLa institution. Megalomania, alcoholism and a propensity for professional bridge-burning left him virtually homeless by the late ’80s. However, he enjoyed a second act in the ’90s after he opened his famed Mother-in-Law Lounge with wife Antoinette, who restored him personally and professionally. The club, which often doubled as the K-Does’ living room, attracted a crowd of tourists, oddball locals, young musicians and journalists (including the New York Times’ Neil Strauss, who had a notorious set-to with the eccentric proprietors while on assignment in 2000). K-Doe’s saga didn’t end with his death: He maintained a bizarre afterlife at the Mother-in-Law and around town in the form of a life-sized sculpture created by local artist Jason Poirier. Though severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, the lounge was restored and run by Antoinette until her death in 2009. Despite a multitude of personal faults, K-Doe emerges here as hilarious, complex and indomitable—a larger-than-life character altogether worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of his city’s oversized musical titans. A vital, essential addition to the shelf of great books about New Orleans. (137 images)

THE TENDER HOUR OF TWILIGHT Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age

Seaver, Richard Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 10, 2012 978-0-374-27378-1

A dense, detailed, priceless eyewitness account of the making of a literary generation between Paris and New York. A native of Pennsylvania, a Navy man, erstwhile teacher and AFS fellow living in Paris in the early 1950s on a shoestring, Seaver fell in with a group of expat writers and intellectuals turning out the English-language literary magazine Merlin, published by Alex Trocchi and Patrick Bowles. Seaver, who spoke French fluently and was in the process of completing graduate studies on James Joyce, had become acquainted with the writing of Samuel Beckett, also living in Paris but then fairly unknown although he had been publishing since the late ’20s. nonfiction

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Seaver’s essay about Beckett and subsequent translations of his short work in the magazine helped spread the word about the brilliant but reclusive bilingual author, whom Seaver finally befriended and depicts here in wonderfully explicit passages. Other legendary figures Seaver encountered included the towering Jean-Paul Sartre, who graciously offered pieces from his own Les Temps modernes and urged him to publish Jean Genet. Gradually the magazine ventured into publishing books, inviting Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias to act as manager debuting with Beckett’s Watt. Marriage to young French violinist Jeanette—later his co-editor at Arcade Publishing and the editor of this posthumously published work—and two subsequent years in the Navy Reserves prompted Seaver to relocate to New York, where he segued naturally into the managing editor role at Grove Press, run by Barney Rosset, the English publisher of Beckett and many of the same incendiary authors Seaver had championed in France. Indeed, the press would make its name fighting pornography charges in the ’60s against D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (and Capricorn) and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and valiantly standing by Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, among many others. A rich record of the vicissitudes of publishing during an inimitable time and place.

A FREE MAN A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi Sethi, Aman Norton (240 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 22, 2012 978-0-393-08890-8

A journalist ingratiates himself with a band of day laborers on the mean streets of Delhi, India. In 2005, Sethi, a young reporter eager to undertake an investigative study of Delhi’s working poor, befriended vagabond Mohammed Ashraf and his crew. Six years later, he found himself still involved in Ashraf ’s life, providing him with both emotional and financial support. Although Sethi initially expressed frustration with Ashraf ’s reluctance to provide a linear timeline of his life story, he soon fell under the spell cast by this streetwise raconteur. Like many others in his circle, Ashraf had run away to Delhi to escape a tempestuous home life. During times when he could find work, he painted houses and did other manual odd jobs; during times when there was either no work to be had or no work that he wanted, he drank heavily, spun tall tales and fantasized about opening his own business. Sethi excels at empathetically depicting what could come across as a miserable existence: he allows Ashraf and the other mazdoors (laborers) to share their stories without either judging them or pretending to be one of them. For all the injustices that these men face every day, the book offers ample humor. In the most poignant chapters, Sethi accompanies Ashraf ’s friend to a tuberculosis hospital. The bureaucracy and despair of such |

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an institution becomes painfully clear when Sethi portrays the panel of admitting doctors, all wearing masks and looking away from their patients. Alternately sad, defiant, carefree and understated, this journey into a world hidden in plain sight is well worth taking.

HOUSE OF STONE A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East

Shadid, Anthony Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (336 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 28, 2012 978-0-547-13466-6

A nostalgic, bittersweet journey back to the Lebanese homestead. As a war correspondent for the Washington Post covering the Israeli attack in Lebanon in 2006, Pulitzer winner Shadid (Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War, 2005, etc.), the child of Lebanese Americans who grew up in America, painfully encountered the home of his Lebanese ancestors in the town of Marjayoun. It was a once-fine house that had been long abandoned and was hit by an Israeli rocket. The author then resolved to take a furlough from his newspaper and reconstruct the house, which had belonged to his great-grandfather and was where his grandmother had spent her first 12 years before the family migrated to America. Shadid traces the two sides of his family that converged at the end of the 19th century in Marjayoun, the Samaras and the Shadids, whose subsequent migrations reflect the strife among the Syrian Lebanese Shiite community with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Suffering from his own divorce and separation from his small daughter, Shadid was often overcome by the “history of departures” witnessed by the house, the ruptures caused by loss and discord among the community of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and the tightly knit customs and rituals that kept things running. Shadid’s year became occupied with finding permission to build, securing willing contractors and artisans, and befriending sympathetic characters among the often hostile, suspicious townspeople. Much of the narrative is a gentle unfolding of observation and insight, as the author reacquaints himself with the Arabic rhythms, “absorbing beauties, and documenting what was no more.” A complicated, elegiac, beautiful attempt to reconcile the physical bayt (home) and the spiritual.

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

“Taking on a looming subject with intelligence and wit, Simmons manages to take the full measure of her man.” from i’m your man

I’M YOUR MAN The Life of Leonard Cohen

CITY A User’s Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of Urban Life

Simmons, Sylvie Ecco/HarperCollins (576 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-06-199498-2 978-0-06-209691-3 e-book

Smith, P.D. Bloomsbury (352 pp.) $40.00 | Jun. 1, 2012 978-1-60819-676-0

An elegant, deeply researched life of the Canadian musician, poet and novelist. With the resurgence of his career in the last decade, Cohen has been the subject of several new books, but it’s hard to imagine a better one than that of veteran music journalist Simmons (Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass, 2001, etc.). Born into a wealthy family of Jewish clothiers in Montreal, Cohen became one of Canada’s leading young literary lights with his early volumes of poetry and two well-received novels. He was already in his early 30s when he became a professional musician, after folk singer Judy Collins brought his songs to the world’s attention with her cover of “Suzanne.” Beginning in 1968, the globe-trotting, seemingly driven Cohen recorded a series of wise, dark albums that made him a star in Europe and brought him a far smaller but devoted following in the United States. He was enjoying renewed commercial and critical success in the mid-’90s when he withdrew into a Zen Buddhist monastery for more than five years. Upon his return to the world, he discovered that his longtime manager had embezzled millions; his unexpected penury prompted a wildly received 2008-2009 world tour that grossed $50 million and finally lifted him, as a septuagenarian, into the top echelon of international stars. Simmons follows every step of Cohen’s peripatetic artistic journey with acuity and no small measure of poetic observation. Drawing on interviews with Cohen and most of his important collaborators and paramours, she paints a deep portrait of a man seemingly torn between the spiritual and the worldly, deeply gifted but plagued by abiding depression and frequent self-doubt. Simmons offers an abundance of revealing stories about Cohen’s ardent womanizing, restless pursuit of enlightenment through sex, drugs, alcohol and spirituality, and sometimes excruciating artistic perfectionism. He emerges in his full complexity, brimming with both seemingly boundless brilliance and abundant human imperfection. Taking on a looming subject with intelligence and wit, Simmons manages to take the full measure of her man. (16page b/w photo insert)

Smith (Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, 2007, etc.) composes a polyphonic paean to our urban past, present and future. More than once in this ambitious text, the author declares that “cities are our greatest creation”—here he emerges as urbanology’s head cheerleader. Each section focuses on a specific aspect of urban life (hotels, skyscrapers, entertainment, etc.) and offers both a brisk history and a current assessment. Throughout this literary and culturally hip book, Smith distributes numerous sidebars, from the history of the parking meter (born in Oklahoma City) to red-light districts. He alludes to Melville (the first to use in print the word “down-town”), Dickens, Poe, Henry James (who didn’t like skyscrapers); he mentions films like Metropolis, Blade Runner and Dirty Harry. The long section about the possible effects of global warming on city life, especially in coastal areas, will probably not sit well with warming’s deniers— oh well. Although Smith often waxes lyrical about city life (he’s a lover in complete thrall), especially about such features as public parks, libraries, museums and street food, he does not neglect the dark side. One disgusting detail: the sewer lines clogged with fat that lie beneath areas featuring lots of fast-food restaurants. The author provides statistics when he needs them—about half of the world’s population now lives in cities (by 2050, he thinks it will be 75 percent)—and a section, both gloomy and upbeat, about urban ruins (e.g., Pompeii and Detroit). Smith writes sensitively about the best of places (Masdar City in Abu Dhabi—a planned community) and the worst (the Dharavi slum in Mumbai) and only neglects bridges and tunnels—a city book minus London and Brooklyn bridges! As exciting, sprawling and multifarious as a shining city on a hill. (Color illustrations throughout)

FAR FROM THE TREE Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Solomon, Andrew Scribner (906 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 13, 2012 978-0-7432-3671-3

National Book Award–winning journalist Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, 2001, etc.) uses issues raised by disability to examine the nature of parenthood, the definition of disability and the ability to control reproduction to create designer children. 36

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More than a decade ago, when he was assigned to cover a student protest at the Lexington Center for the Deaf in Queens, N.Y., over the hiring of a CEO with normal hearing, the author began to look at medical and cultural issues raised by disability. The protesters demanded that deafness not be considered a disability, but rather a neuro-diversity on par with ethnic diversity. Some members of the deaf community even considered cochlear implants in young children as “a genocidal attack on a vibrant community” because of the linguistic richness of sign language. Solomon also wrote a piece on child prodigies based on an interview with the Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin, and he followed with a story about the lives of dwarfs based on the experience of a friend who sought role models for her daughter. Gradually, Far from the Tree began to take shape as the author explored more deeply the question of disability. Additional chapters cover Down syndrome (a genetic disorder), autism (of unknown origin), transgenderism and more. Solomon writes about the transformative, “terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility” faced by parents who cherish severely disabled children, and he takes an in-depth look at the struggles of parents of autistic children who behave destructively. He also explores the fascinating mental lives of independently functioning autistic individuals and speculates on the possibility that geniuses such as Mozart and Einstein were at the far end of the spectrum. Throughout, Solomon reflects on his own history as a gay man who has been bullied when he didn’t conform to society’s image of masculinity. An informative and moving book that raises profound issues regarding the nature of love, the value of human life and the future of humanity.

ON A FARTHER SHORE The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson Souder, William Crown (496 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-307-46220-6

Fifty years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring, Pulitzer Prize nominee Souder (Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America, 2004, etc.) examines the legacy and lasting impact of Carson’s passionate environmental work. “By 1959, some eighty million pounds of DDT were being used annually in the United States,” writes the author. Already a vocal conservationist, Carson had long suspected that pesticide use was accumulatively detrimental to animals and humans. This holistic view of the living world was startling and prescient, and it struck a chord with an American public that was already spooked by the similar dangers of fallout from nuclear testing. Carson grappled with the literary celebrity that accompanied Silent Spring, yearning to maintain a quiet, private life yet forced to answer the powerful opposition she faced from the chemical industry. Souder writes beautifully about this dichotomy, revealing intimate details about the writing process and her |

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relationships with editors, fans, family and her beloved companion Dorothy Freeman, with whom she spent some of her happiest moments while on the Maine coastline. The author also conducted ample contextual research, providing readers with a clear sense of the political, economic and social ramifications of DDT use and the threat of atomic warfare and how Carson’s writing played a vital role in progressive public policy for decades after her death. One wonders how the past 50 years might have been different were Carson alive to write about global warming, fossil fuels, the erosion of coral reefs and other similar matters. That her views on DDT were eventually proven correct is just a small part of her legacy as an environmental pioneer but also a defining instance of citizen activism. A poignant, galvanizing, meaningful tribute.

DEARIE The Remarkable Life of Julia Child Spitz, Bob Knopf (432 pp.) $29.95 | Aug. 15, 2012 978-0-307-27222-5

Published to coincide with what would have been her 100th birthday, this biography of the iconic Julia Child (1912–2004) does full justice to its complex subject. Spitz (The Saucier’s Apprentice: One Long Strange Trip through the Great Cooking Schools of Europe, 2008, etc.) describes the “irrepressible reality” of Child, who became a TV superstar, effectively launching “public television into the spotlight, big-time.” In his view, the 1961 publication of her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, came at just the right time. Americans were tired of the preceding “era of dreary button-down conformity,” and they were ready for a gastronomic revolution. Frustrated housewives reading Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique welcomed the larger-than-life personality and showmanship of this tall, outspoken woman as she demonstrated the intricacies of French recipes with what appeared to be blithe disregard when things went wrong. Child reveled in her celebrity status, but this was only one aspect of her complex personality. Like most women of her generation born in traditional upper-middle-class homes, she was not expected to have an independent career. A wartime stint in the OSS was liberating. Not only did she hold a highly responsible job, but she met and married career diplomat Paul Child, moving with him to France. Popular accounts of her life, including the book and film Julie and Julia, describe her enchantment with French haute cuisine and her determination to master the skills of a top chef. Spitz captures another side of her complex personality: her fierce diligence in mastering the science as well as the art of cooking through detailed experimentation and her concern to translate the preparation of complex French recipes for readers in America—an attention to detail that carried over to her TV programs. An engrossing biography of a woman worthy of iconic status. |

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“An eye-opening take on how romantic sentimentalism about nature can have destructive consequences.” from nature wars

RED PLENTY

Spufford, Francis Graywolf (448 pp.) $16.00 paperback | Feb. 14, 2012 978-1-55597-604-0 The strange, sad, hilarious story of the Soviet Union’s blind pursuit of a Communist paradise, told through a mix of history and fiction, using both to get to the truth. Spufford (I May Be Some Time, 2003, etc.) traces the latter half of the history of the Soviet Union, starting in the late 1950s, when the Soviets were seeing an imaginary light over the horizon. After 40 years that included struggle, war, starvation and Stalin, the Marxist dream looked as if it might be taking off under Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet Union’s economic growth more than doubled that of the United States, and if it kept going at the same rate, the “planned economy” would “overtake and surpass” capitalist America. Cars, food and houses would be better, and there would be more money and leisure all around, thanks to a top-down, start-to-finish management that “could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfillment of human needs.” Through a series of episodes involving economists, scientists, computer programmers, industrialists, artists and politicians—some real, some imagined, some drawn together from composites—Spufford tells the story of the life and death of a national illusion, as Utopian dreams moldered into grim dystopian realities. The planned economy was a worker’s nightmare, where production targets increased even as equipment became more and more outdated, and unforeseen, unplanned events—like the sudden loss of a spinning machine at a textile factory—set off a ripple effect of unproductiveness. Pay cuts and scarce commodities led to riots, such as one in Novocherkassk, where the dead bodies were hauled out and the bloody streets were repaved overnight. In his often-whimsical, somewhat Nabokov-ian notes, Spufford freely points out his own inventions, approximations and hedged bets on what might have happened. A highly creative, illuminating, genre-resisting history.

NATURE WARS The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds Sterba, Jim Crown (368 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 13, 2012 978-0-307-34196-9

Journalist Sterba (Frankie’s Place: A Love Story, 2003, etc.) employs humor and an eye for the absurd to document the sometimes bizarre conflicts that arise as a consequence of America’s transformed relationship with nature. 38

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As forest cover has grown back to more than two-thirds of its pre-colonial extent, wildlife recovery from the “so-called era of extermination in the last half of the nineteenth century” has accelerated. People who grew up with teddy bears and Disney’s Bambi have different attitudes to furry, cuddly creatures than their grandparents did. Nowadays, someone can get death threats while trying to protect communities from resurgent populations of dangerous wild creatures like coyotes and bears, or even from the activities of feral cats. Sterba provides a summary history of the wilderness colonists found, the replacement of the great Eastern forest with farmland and the market-driven extermination of wildlife through commercial hunting and trapping. He continues with cases studies of beaver, deer, bear and geese to show how, as land has reverted to forest, human communities have been polarized by the development of “problems” with each of these species and others. The author presents a repeating pattern: At first, returners are welcomed and encouraged with food, only to be rejected as the dangerous downside begins to emerge. Detailed accounts of efforts to outline solutions, and also of such often-overlooked consequences of this pattern as roadkill, supplement this deeply conflicted overall picture. An eye-opening take on how romantic sentimentalism about nature can have destructive consequences.

DARWIN’S GHOSTS The Secret History of Evolution Stott, Rebecca Spiegel & Grau (400 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 12, 2012 978-1-4000-6937-8

Stott (English Literature and Creative Writing/Univ. of East Anglia; The Coral Thief, 2009, etc.) conjures up the spirits of Darwin’s scientific predecessors in this excellent follow-up to Darwin and the Barnacle (2003). When Darwin finally published On the Origins of Species in 1859, he knew he would become the center of passionate debate and possibly even prosecution. However, he did not expect to be charged with “failing to acknowledge his predecessors”—a quotation from a letter sent to him by an Oxford geometry professor, Rev. Baden Powell, who himself faced the possibility of prosecution for heresy. In the first authorized American edition of his iconic work, Darwin attempted to rectify the situation by including a list of his predecessors. Stott amplifies Darwin’s list and provides a lively account of the “pathfinders, iconoclasts, and innovators” who were Darwin’s spiritual kin over the preceding 2,000 years. She chronicles their lives as they struggled to understand the relationship between extinct and existing species, including humans; she also examines the political and religious persecution they faced from their opponents. Stott begins with Aristotle, who was forced into exile on the island of Lesbos, where he stayed for four years. He dissected birds and fish and puzzled over sponges, which had characteristics nonfiction

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of both animals and vegetables. Another of Darwin’s kindred spirits was Benoit de Maillet, who by the mid-18th century had assembled geological and fossil findings to substantiate his claim that the earth was billions of years old and that land species had evolved from sea creatures. Unfortunately, as Darwin learned after including Maillet on the list, Maillet also reported sightings of mermen. The author also includes discussions of, among others, Leonardo da Vinci, Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley and the ninth-century Islamic philologist and lexicographer known as al-Jahiz. Stott masterfully shows how Darwin, by discovering the mechanism of natural selection, made a unique contribution, but he did not stand alone—nor did he claim to.

WILD From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Strayed, Cheryl Knopf (336 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 20, 2012 978-0-307-59273-6 978-0-307-95765-8 e-book

Unsentimental memoir of the author’s three-month solo hike from California to Washington along the

Pacific Crest Trail. Following the death of her mother, Strayed’s (Torch, 2006) life quickly disintegrated. Family ties melted away; she divorced her husband and slipped into drug use. For the next four years, life was a series of disappointments. “I was crying over all of it,” she writes, “over the sick mire I’d made of my life since my mother died; over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly.” While waiting in line at an outdoors store, Strayed read the back cover of a book about the Pacific Crest Trail. Initially, the idea of hiking the trail became a vague apparition, then a goal. Woefully underprepared for the wilderness, out of shape and carrying a ridiculously overweight pack, the author set out from the small California town of Mojave, toward a bridge (“the Bridge of the Gods”) crossing the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. Strayed’s writing admirably conveys the rigors and rewards of long-distance hiking. Along the way, she suffered aches, pains, loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the author also discovered a newfound sense of awe; for her, hiking the PCT was “powerful and fundamental” and “truly hard and glorious.” Strayed was stunned by how the trail both shattered and sheltered her. Most of the hikers she met along the way were helpful, and she also encountered instances of trail magic, “the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.” A candid, inspiring narrative of the author’s brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self.

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GOD’S HOTEL A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine Sweet, Victoria Riverhead (384 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 26, 2012 978-1-59448-843-6

A doctor’s experiences in a unique corner of the medical world. At Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, the doctors and nurses provide long-term care for the sick poor; the working and living environments are unlike that of any other hospital in the country. Physician Sweet accepted a job at Laguna Honda since they were willing to offer her a part-time position (extremely rare at the time), and she was interested in continuing to practice medicine while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate in the history of medicine. The author had come to realize that modern medicine did not mesh with her idea of being a physician, and she sought answers in the teachings of Hildegard of Bingen, a German nun who practiced medicine in the Middle Ages and who, miraculously, penned a medical textbook. Laguna Honda turned out to be the perfect place to put many of Hildegard’s ancient theories into practice. What was originally supposed to be a monthslong stopover turned into a career spanning more than 20 years and countless life-altering realizations about the nature of medicine. Sweet writes of Laguna Honda with unguarded affection, but she doesn’t gloss over the negative phases. She is remarkably honest about the darker side of her experiences at the hospital: the patients who couldn’t be saved, patients whose bad behavior was openly tolerated (smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.), the political infighting among the staff and bad managerial decisions. In the dozen or so patient success stories, Sweet’s warm, anecdotal style shines brightest. The author’s compelling argument for Laguna Honda’s philosophy of “slow medicine” will make readers contemplate if perhaps the body should be viewed more as a garden to be tended rather than a machine to be fixed.

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SEASON OF THE WITCH Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

Talbot, David Free Press (464 pp.) $28.00 | May 8, 2012 978-1-4391-0821-5 978-1-4391-2787-2 e-book

An ambitious, labor-of-love illumination of a city’s soul, celebrating the uniqueness of San Francisco without minimizing the price paid for the city’s free-spiritedness. “This is my love letter to San Francisco,” writes Salon founder and CEO Talbot (Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, 2007). “But if it’s a valentine, it’s a bloody valentine, filled with the raw truth as well as the glory about the city that has been my home for more than three decades now.” More than a retread of beatnik and hippie years or a series of chapters on colorful characters (has any city boasted more than San Francisco?), the author encompasses the city’s essence. He seeks to make sense of how San Francisco became a magnet for those who felt they didn’t fit elsewhere, how it sparked the “Summer of Love,” a race war, the murders of its mayor and his charismatic ally (in which the author finds the police department “deeply implicated”), radical bombings, a high-profile kidnapping and the most notorious mass suicide in human history (Jonestown, in exile from San Francisco, which the author says should more appropriately be considered a “slaughter”). Talbot loves his city deeply and knows it well, making the pieces of the puzzle fit together, letting the reader understand how a charismatic religious crackpot such as Jim Jones could wield such powerful political influence, how the Super Bowl victory of the San Francisco 49ers helped the city heal, how the conservative Italian Catholics who had long lived there wrestled with exotic newcomers for the soul of the city. “Cities, like people, have souls,” he writes. “And they can be broken by terrible events, but they can also be healed.” Though he’s a little too enamored with “angel-headed hipsters” and “fairy dust,” Talbot takes the reader much deeper than cliché, exploring a San Francisco that tourists never discover.

MASTERS OF THE PLANET The Search for Our Human Origins

Tattersall, Ian Palgrave Macmillan (272 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 27, 2012 978-0-230-10875-2 A veteran anthropologist writes a superb overview of how our species developed (a long process) and how we

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

grew smart enough to dominate the planet (a short process in which evolution played little part). Tattersall (Paleontology: A Brief History of Life, 2010, etc.), curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, begins with early hominids, who took the first step away from apedom about 5 million years ago by rising to walk on two legs. In absorbing detail, he describes two centuries of often-grueling field research that turned up more species that learned to make tools and whose brains slowly grew. For 3 million years, our small-brained ancestors, the Australopithecus genus, spread throughout Africa before leaving the scene. From about 2 million years ago, bigger-brained members of genus Homo ranged across Eurasia without making a great impression. Homo sapiens, remarkably young at 200,000 years, did not seem a great improvement until about 60,000 years ago, when their brains began processing information symbolically, leading to language, art, technology and sophisticated social organization, all of which accompanied our species across the world, wiping out competing hominids. While researchers argue over why this happened, Tattersall emphasizes that evolutionary milestones, even dramatic ones like flying, do not happen when new features appear but take advantage of those already present. Feathers existed long before birds flew, and Homo sapiens’ brains were always capable of great things. Keeping a critical eye on the evidence and a skeptical one on theories, Tattersall confirms his status among world anthropologists by delivering a superior popular explanation of human origins.

THE PARTNERSHIP Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb

Taubman, Philip Harper/HarperCollins (496 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 3, 2012 978-0-06-174400-6

Timely portrait of an alliance, seemingly unlikely, of former Cold War mavens now committed to nuclear disarmament. Only last month did the news come that China’s nuclear arsenal is likely much more extensive than anyone had guessed. Russia is a constant worry, not least because its conventional forces are so reduced that the temptation is ever greater to rely on nuclear solutions in the event of an attack, real or perceived. But the heroes of former New York Times reporter and editor Taubman’s (Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage, 2003, etc.) tale are less worried about these major players on the world stage than about the disaffected, shadowy figures from the margins—al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps even the narcotraficantes. At the center of the group is nuclear strategist Sidney Drell; around him are Sam Nunn, at one time “the Senate’s leading authority on Cold War military matters”; George Shultz and William Perry. Closing up the five—and this may give Christopher nonfiction

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“A profound and richly satisfying reckoning with the movies and what they mean.” from the big screen

Hitchens fits—is Henry Kissinger, that dark master of realpolitik, who more than any of the other figures maneuvered and positioned himself for best advantage when, early in 2011, the quintet signed off on a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece calling for the effective abolition of nuclear arms. Kissinger’s position, it seems, is still nuanced—read: subject to revocation—but the mere fact that these five quite different players, whose names show up in the indexes of every history of the Cold War, came together on the point was significant enough. However, as Taubman continues, there’s more to the story. The great value of his book is twofold. First, the author gives a lucid summary of the long, shifting struggle between East and West and the contributions each of the five made to it, for better or worse. (See Robert De Niro’s film The Good Shepherd for worse.) Second, Taubman shows how influential these old Cold Warriors have been in shaping the policy of the present administration and its “ambitious nuclear agenda,” providing a useful look at the way in which such decisions are made and shaped. Will the partnership prevail? Stay tuned, but hope for the best—for, they warn, “[i]f urgent steps are not taken to rein in nuclear weapons...a catastrophic attack is virtually inevitable.”

DARKEST AMERICA Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop

Taylor, Yuval; Austen, Jake Norton (256 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 27, 2012 978-0-393-07098-9

A provocative, compelling exploration of one of the most controversial elements of the black entertainment world. Chicago Review Press senior editor Taylor and Roctober magazine editor Austen explore the long history not only of African-American involvement in minstrel performances, but also of black-derived comedy that utilizes elements from the minstrel act—exaggerated stereotypes of the black experience that hearken back to the minstrel shows of the 19th century. More precisely, the authors examine the debates over these myriad forms of entertainment and the accusations of minstrelsy that have often embroiled black entertainers and intellectuals in fevered debates over the nature and depiction of the black experience. Taylor and Austen deftly argue that African-Americans have taken on perceived minstrelsy in one of three ways. The first has been simply to embrace such forms of entertainment and comedy. The second has been to signify on them—i.e., to engage in self-aware parody and wry utilization of elements of minstrelsy to make a larger point. The third approach involves waging war on such stereotypes, which often leads to heated accusations and counterattacks. The authors take a kaleidoscopic look at their topic, emphasizing a diverse range of individuals and works, including blackface entertainer Bert Williams, writers Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, Stanley Crouch’s attacks on Tupac Shakur as a “thug minstrel,” |

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Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled and comedian Dave Chappelle’s self-exile when he reached the conclusion that his own work had moved uncomfortably from comedy about stereotyping to enabling the very stereotypes he was combating. An innovative, marvelous book about comedy, stereotypes and the struggle to steer through the sometimesfierce internal debates over African-American identity in a society still struggling with its racial past.

THE BIG SCREEN The Story of the Movies

Thomson, David Farrar, Straus and Giroux (592 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 16, 2012 978-0-374-19189-4

Thomson (The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, 2009, etc.) brings his encyclopedic knowledge of film and idiosyncratic, allusive style to bear on this ambitious consideration of the history of motion pictures and their effect on the audience. The author goes beyond mere survey and analysis to question what movies mean to us and how they have shaped our perceptions and beliefs. Thomson chronicles the development of movies from Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographic experiments to the phenomenon of Internet pornography. Along the way, he explicates the excitement and politically fraught evolution of Soviet cinema, the provocations of the European New Wave, the allure of film noir and the world-shaking product of Hollywood, but the author makes no attempt to give a comprehensive or strictly linear history of the medium. Thomson is more interested in making striking connections, looking deeply at particular films, such as Brief Encounter (a surprising subject for such intense scrutiny and indicative of Thomson’s iconoclastic bent) or the TV landmark I Love Lucy, to pursue the central question of his history: What does life in front of screens do to us? Thomson’s approach is lyrical and questing rather than academic; the book is accessible to anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject, written in a distinctive voice, learned and authoritative without pedantic dryness and touched with wonder and trepidation at the primal power of the image. Readers familiar with the author’s Biographical Dictionary of Film will be happy to note that Thomson’s beguiling knack for capturing the essences of our movie icons in poetic or provocative asides has not diminished, and the scholarship on display is first-rate. However, the heart of this unique overview is the author’s ambivalence about the power we grant those shadows on the wall. A profound and richly satisfying reckoning with the movies and what they mean.

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

RISE TO GREATNESS Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year

KURT VONNEGUT Letters

Vonnegut, Kurt Wakefield, Dan—Ed. Delacorte (496 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 1, 2012 978-0-385-34375-6 978-0-345-53539-9 e-book

Von Drehle, David Henry Holt (480 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 30, 2012 978-0-8050-7970-8

A historian zeroes in on the year Lincoln found his footing as president and set the country on a bold new course. “Never has there been a moment in history,” said one U.S. senator, “when so much was all compressed into a little time.” Von Drehle (Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, 2003, etc.) charts the tumultuous year, month by month, to demonstrate how the momentous events of 1862 unfolded. Amid the turmoil of Civil War, the largely Republican Congress passed legislation with far-reaching postwar consequences: funding a transcontinental railroad and land-grant colleges, strengthening the Army and Navy, establishing a Bureau of Agriculture, adopting new fiscal and monetary policies, outlawing slavery in the District of Columbia, instituting a draft and authorizing the enlistment of blacks in the military. For all these enterprises to flourish, though, the war still had to be won. With rumors of domestic conspiracies and coups swirling and with the allegiance of border states still tenuous, the Civil War turned savage and hard with unprecedented slaughters at places like Shiloh, Antietam and Fredericksburg. At the center of the storm, Von Drehle deftly places Lincoln, gradually mastering the art of war, ultimately firing the too-timid McClellan, solemnly accepting and desperately searching for a general to apply the cruel arithmetic necessary for Union victory. In 1862, Lincoln suffered the loss of a son and the near loss of another, and he watched his grieving wife become unmoored. All the while, the president maneuvered around Taney’s Supreme Court, quelled an insurrection in the Republican caucus, mediated the squabbling in his Cabinet, held off the Democrats in the midterm elections and prepared the ground for the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years of bitter fighting remained, but Confederate armies would never again be as formidable. Meanwhile, under Lincoln’s steady hand, the Union put in place the political and military machinery that would win the war and assure a future few imagined before Fort Sumter. A thoroughly engaging examination of the irreversible changes emerging from a year when the nation’s very survival remained in doubt. (8-page insert with 16-20 b/w illustrations; 3-5 maps)

Selected and edited letters by the author of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and other enduringly popular novels, letters that reveal Vonnegut’s passions, annoyances, loves, losses, mind and heart. Edited and annotated by his friend and fellow Hoosier novelist Wakefield (The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate, 2006, etc.), Vonnegut’s letters, arranged by decade, reveal his wit and literary style, as well as his demons. Wakefield annotates lightly and introduces each decade with a swift biography and commentary. Mostly, however, the letters stand alone—and stand tall, indeed. A letter from 1945 tells his worried parents about his experiences as a POW in Dresden during the firebombing; the final letter declines an invitation to appear at Cornell. “At 84,” wrote Vonnegut, who died in 2007, “I resemble nothing so much as an iguana, hate travel, and have nothing to say. I might as well send a spent Roman candle in my stead.” Vonnegut remained close to his many relatives, and readers can chart his personal life here— his first marriage (ended in divorce), his relationships with his children (some were adopted), his second marriage (to photographer Jill Krementz). That marriage was often difficult, and he writes bitterly about finding evidence of her infidelity. His professional growth chart is here, too—his early struggle, his time teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his rising celebrity and fame, and his struggles to write later in his life. The political Vonnegut is much in evidence, as well. There are fiery letters about censorship and book burning and some anti-conservative rhetoric. Wakefield also includes Vonnegut’s touching letters to encourage other writers and to deal with an angry daughter. Vonnegut’s most human of hearts beats on every page. (1 or 2 b/w inserts of illustrations)

NIGHTCAP AT DAWN American Soldiers’ Counterinsurgency in Iraq

Walker, J.B. Skyhorse Publishing (568 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-61608-617-6 Iraq war experiences from those who were there. “Sgt. J.B. Walker,” the “author” of this absorbing, dramatically vivid chronicle, is a pen-named collective effort by American soldiers fighting in Iraq. Originally

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self-published, the narrative is comprised of candid emails assembled once the group returned to American soil and encompasses much more than its original intent to detail “the simple charms of soldiering.” With exacting scrutiny, many of the unnamed authors share the stark realities and myriad complications of counterinsurgency efforts. Each of the five sections delves deeply into the multilayered aspects of military duty: the culture shock from intercepting violence, soldiering with a concussion, profiling jihadist militants, the inexplicability of suicide bombing and the silent suffering of innocent Iraqi women and children. Most affective are the personal accounts, ranging from the poignant to the humorous. Individual narration of violent conflicts and meticulously rendered scenes of armed tactical maneuvering are tempered by the soldiers’ firstperson depiction of fearless Iraqi civilians demonstrating resistance to cutthroat guerrilla movements. Expertly archived and originally written for military audiences, this confluence of warfare experiences is sure to garner widespread attention, with the publishing proceeds directed to charities serving military families, “the unacknowledged soldiers of any war.” A bracing cooperative effort taking readers as close to war as humanly possible.

ON THE EVE The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War

Wasserstein, Bernard Simon & Schuster (448 pp.) $30.00 | May 1, 2012 978-1-4165-9427-7 A bright, hard glimpse at the final thriving days of European Jewry and the first edges of its unraveling. Straightforward, scholarly and tidily organized, this historical snapshot by Wasserstein (Modern European Jewish History/Univ. of Chicago; Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time, 2007, etc.) encompasses myriad aspects of Jewish society, culture, language, health, demographics, and religious and political sects. Nearly 10 million Jews were inhabiting Europe, contained in what the author delineates as four zones enjoying more or less benevolent status among communities of non-Jews but already feeling the lashing of secular currents as well as anti-Semitism—across both Europe and the Soviet Union. On the one hand, Jews tended to live longer and have lower rates of alcoholism and infant mortality; on the other, they were migrating, “marrying out” and quarreling among themselves, while birth rates were declining. Anti-Semitism, stoked by paranoia, nationalism and conspiracy theories such as in France, became “part of the perfume of the age.” Jews, writes Wasserstein, essentially became victims of their own success. In concise chapters, the author examines one facet of Jewish identity after another for a staggering big picture: politics, Zionism, life from shtetl to shtot (city), cultural centers like Minsk and Salonica, the press, the theater, the status of women, converts, vernacular languages like Yiddish and Judeo-Espanol, and much more. |

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A wide-ranging, marvelously complete overview of a diverse, teeming civilization poised for ruin. (32 b/w photos)

CONSIDER THE FORK A History of How We Cook and Eat

Wilson, Bee Basic (336 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 9, 2012 978-0-465-02176-5

From British food writer Wilson (Sandwich: A Global History, 2010, etc.), a savory survey of kitchen implements and their impact. We normally apply the word “technology” to military and industrial equipment, writes the author, but in fact, developments in those fields often carry over to the kitchen. The inventor of stainless steel was trying to improve gun barrels, and the creator of the microwave oven was working on naval radar systems. In addition, innovations in cookware can have enormous social impact: Before food was cooked in a pot, people who lost their teeth and couldn’t chew literally starved to death. In the lively prose of a seasoned journalist, Wilson blends personal reminiscences with well-researched history to illustrate how the changing nature of our equipment affects what we eat and how we cook. “Knife” explores the difference between Western eaters, who cut big pieces of cooked food at the table, and the Chinese wielders of a tou, who chop up food into equal-sized pieces to be quickly cooked, saving energy in a country with limited fuel. “Fire” traces the evolution from open hearths to enclosed stoves, which brought women into the professional kitchen after centuries when their billowing skirts posed too much of a fire hazard for them to serve as cooks. In “Grind,” Wilson notes that the endless labor involved in producing smooth, highly refined food wasn’t an issue in a world where middle-class and wealthy Europeans had lots of servants; Wilson praises the Cuisinart as a revolutionary device “for the transformation of cooking from pain to pleasure.” Although she enjoys and vividly describes time-honored, painstaking methods of cooking, she also appreciates modern conveniences. Eating utensils, refrigeration and measurement (with a bemused look at Americans’ affection for measuring by volume as opposed to the much more accurate method of weighing) are among the other topics Wilson addresses in a narrative whose light tone enlivens formidable scholarship. Rarely has a book with so much information been such an entertaining read.

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“Wilson succeeds in explaining his complex ideas, so attentive readers will receive a deeply satisfying exposure to a major scientific controversy.” from the social conquest of earth

THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH

LINCOLN’S CODE The Laws of War in American History

Wilson, Edward O. Liveright/Norton (352 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 9, 2012 978-0-87140-413-8

K i r k us M edi a L L C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer MEG LABORDE KU E H N Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny SVP, Online Paul H offman # Copyright 2012 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 19487428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744. Subscription prices are: Digital & Print Subscription (U.S.) - 13 Months ($199.00) Digital & Print Subscription (International) - 13 Months ($229.00) Digital Only Subscription - 13 Months ($169.00) Single copy: $25.00. All other rates on request.

Never shy about tackling big questions, veteran evolutionary biologist Wilson (The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, 2006, etc.) delivers his thoughtful if contentious explanation of why humans rule the Earth. After a respectful nod to the old favorites (big brains, tools, language, fire), the author maintains that these merely provide the background to our overpowering “eusociality”; we are the world’s most intensely social creatures, living in complex societies of mutually dependent individuals. Wilson adds that another eusocial organism, the ant, dominated terrestrial life for 50 million years before humans appeared; it remains a close second. The author provides a provocative comparison of how this powerful but rare evolutionary strategy vaulted two wildly different species to the top of the heap. Both originated with individuals cooperating and behaving altruistically, often sacrificing themselves, to protect a defensible nest. For humans, this crucial step began when extended families of our Homo erectus ancestors gathered around campfires over 1 million years ago. Gradually, members of multiple generations divided labor and specialized. Natural selection worked to expand this eusociality, and Wilson emphasizes that it was the group that evolved. Whether they were genetically related or not mattered little. Group selection—as opposed to kin selection, i.e., the “selfish gene” à la Richard Dawkins—is the author’s big idea. Few lay readers will disagree, but Wilson’s fellow biologists are not so sure; kin versus group selection remains a subject of fierce debate. Wilson succeeds in explaining his complex ideas, so attentive readers will receive a deeply satisfying exposure to a major scientific controversy. (90 illustrations)

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Witt, John Fabian Free Press (528 pp.) $32.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4165-6983-1

Artfully mixing law, history and sharp analysis, a Yale law professor examines the persistent struggle to reconcile justice and humanitarianism in America’s conduct of war. Issued to the Union Army in 1863, Lincoln’s codes of war went out under the president’s name, but the 157 articles were drafted principally by Francis Lieber, a Columbia College political scientist and historian. Lieber’s codification of the laws and usages of war formally enshrined a number of humanitarian limits to war’s barbarity. However, by authorizing various uses of force “indispensable for securing the ends of war,” the rules unleashed a new ferocity, replacing Enlightenment-style, “gentlemanly” armed conflict with new imperatives that recognized the legitimacy of the war’s aims. Witt (Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, 2007, etc.) attributes this new, “tough humanitarianism” to Lincoln’s determination to abandon the “rose-water tactics” of the early war in favor of new measures that would vindicate the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. Though he focuses primarily on the Civil War and its aftermath, Witt provides a rich historical context, judiciously selecting diplomatic and wartime episodes, from the French and Indian War to the Philippine Insurrection, to explain this lasting transformation of the old rules into something military historians now recognize as the “American way of war.” Topics range from the concept of neutrality to the oftentimes difficult distinctions between soldiers and civilians, to the indiscriminate use of military commissions, all resonant with today’s headlines. The author vivifies commentary from philosophers and jurists, decisions from judges and maneuvering by statesmen with sharp vignettes of battlefield commanders, who were obliged to grapple with the constraints law imposes on war. Truly remarkable, composed with all the precision and insight you expect from a law professor, marked by all the elegance and sparkling readability you don’t.

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top 25 nonfiction books

WINTER JOURNAL Paul Auster Henry Holt

ARE YOU MY MOTHER?

Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

MAGIC HOURS Tom Bissell Believer Books/ McSweeney’s

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS

HAITI

THE PASSAGE OF POWER

TURING’S CATHEDRAL

PRIVATE EMPIRE

THE STORY OF EARTH

Katherine Boo Random House

Robert A. Caro Knopf

Steve Coll Penguin Press

AS TEXAS GOES… Gail Collins Liveright/Norton

Laurent Dubois Metropolitan/Henry Holt

George Dyson Pantheon

Robert Hazen Viking

MORTALITY

Christopher Hitchens Twelve

MARVEL COMICS

Sean Howe Harper/HarperCollins

FIRE IN THE ASHES Jonathan Kozol Crown

THE MANSION OF HAPPINESS Jill Lepore Knopf

top 25 n o n f i c t i o n b o o k s ( c o n t. )

WHEN GOD TALKS BACK T.M. Luhrmann Knopf

THOMAS JEFFERSON Jon Meacham Random House

SPILLOVER

David Quammen Norton

JOSEPH ANTON

Andrew Solomon Scribner

THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH

WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY

DARWIN’S GHOST

LINCOLN’S CODE

I’M YOUR MAN

ON A FARTHER SHORE

Salman Rushdie Random House

Michael Sandel Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Sylvie Simmons Ecco/HarperCollins

FAR FROM THE TREE

Rebecca Stott Spiegel & Grau

William Souder Crown

Edward O. Wilson Liveright/Norton

John Fabian Witt Free Press

teen When a significant part of your job is surrounding yourself with the best books of the year and picking the 100 top titles, you know you’ve got it good. Not easy, but good. I start to narrow my choices down right after Labor Day in a weekslong process that involved input from my corps of reviewers and lots of reading. (Oh, darn.) Though it certainly seems that this year had more than its share of dismal, duplicative dystopian romances, the variety I found in sifting the year’s best books was heartening. I found nail-biting thrillers of both the post-apocalyptic and techno kinds, gritty tales of contemporary kids confronting big problems, soaring fantasies that immersed me in unforgettable worlds, sharply intelligent science fiction, provocative nonfiction, inventive and fresh paranormal adventures, transporting historical fiction and laugh-out-loud comedy. What a bounty. Some books that did not receive stars in the initial review process turned out to have a long-lasting impact, and I am pleased to include many of these on my final list. There’s more than just a little something for everyone here; explore and enjoy.

Hook and, especially, Peter, with his need to be best—from winning games to protecting the lost boys. He’s irresistible; even mermaids, with their long hair and sharp teeth, aren’t immune. Tink’s love and helplessness (faeries read thoughts but cannot speak) become a source of tension and metaphor in this postcolonial fable that covers a lot of ground: wilderness and civilization, gender and power, time and change. Working with the darker threads of Barrie’s bittersweet classic, Anderson weaves an enchanting tale. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Andrews, Jesse Amulet/Abrams (304 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-1-4197-0176-4 A frequently hysterical confessional from a teen narrator who won’t be able to convince readers he’s as unlikable as he wants them to believe. “I have no idea how to write this stupid book,” narrator Greg begins. Without answering the obvious question—just why is he writing “this stupid book”?—Greg lets readers in on plenty else. His filmmaking ambitions. His unlikely friendship with the unfortunately short, chain-smoking, foulmouthed, African-American Earl of the title. And his unlikelier friendship with Rachel, the titular “dying girl.” Punctuating his aggressively self-hating account with film scripts and digressions, he chronicles his senior year, in which his mother guilt-trips him into hanging out with Rachel, who has acute myelogenous leukemia. Almost professionally socially awkward, Greg navigates his unwanted relationship with Rachel by showing her the films he’s made with Earl, an oeuvre begun in fifth grade with their remake of Aguirre, Wrath of God. Greg’s uber-snarky narration is self-conscious in the extreme, resulting in lines like, “This entire paragraph is a moron.” Debut novelist Andrews succeeds brilliantly in painting a portrait of a kid whose responses to emotional duress are entirely believable and sympathetic, however fiercely he professes his essential crappiness as a human being. Though this novel begs inevitable thematic comparisons to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012), it stands on its own in inventiveness, humor and heart. (Fiction. 14 & up)

— Vicky Smith

TIGER LILY

Anderson, Jodi Lynn HarperTeen (300 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-06-200325-6 It’s no paradise—white-sand beaches and spectacular sunsets come with mud, mosquitoes and croc-infested swamps— but guided by fragile, insect-size faerie Tink, readers are drawn into this richly re-imagined Neverland anyway. Tink is obsessed with Tiger Lily, whose tribe avoids pirates and Peter Pan’s lost boys, believed to carry the aging disease. (Neverlanders stop aging when some life-defining event occurs.) Adopted daughter of shaman Tik Tok, Tiger Lily is proud and competitive, kept at a wary distance by her peers except for gentle Pine Sap, whose unconditional love she appreciates but doesn’t return. Athletic Tiger Lily, nonathletic Pine Sap and Tik Tok, whose identity doesn’t match his gender, share a bond that’s shaken after Tiger Lily rescues an English shipwreck survivor, then falls in love with Peter, following him into an emotional wilderness as intoxicating and dangerous as Neverland itself. Equally strong passions rule psychotic Smee, alcoholic |

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best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

MASTER OF DECEIT J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies Aronson, Marc Candlewick (240 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5025-4

In fascinating detail, Aronson tells the story of America during J. Edgar Hoover’s reign as head of the FBI and “the nearly fifty years of criminal activity that was his legacy.” For today’s students, communism and anti-communism are “just terms that appear on tests, like the Whig, Greenback, or Know-Nothing parties,” but this volume brings alive the drama of the Cold War period and demonstrates its significance for readers now. Taking his title from Hoover’s 1958 work on the dangers of communism, Aronson writes about the dangers of a “security at all costs” mentality during the Cold War and, by extension, our post-9/11 world. He covers a large slice of history—the Palmer raids of 1919, the gangster era, the Scottsboro case, World War II, the Rosenbergs, Joseph McCarthy, the civil rights movement and Watergate—but this is no mere recitation of the facts; it’s a masterpiece of historical narrative, with the momentum of a thrilling novel and the historical detail of the best nonfiction. With references as far-flung as Karl Marx, Stalin, Wordsworth, American Idol, The Hunger Games and The Lord of the Rings, this is as much about how history is written as it is about Hoover and his times. Extensive backmatter includes fascinating comments on the research, thorough source notes that are actually interesting to read and a lengthy bibliography. Written with the authority of a fine writer with an inquiring mind, this dramatic story is history writing at its best. (Nonfiction. 14 & up)

THE DROWNED CITIES Bacigalupi, Paolo Little, Brown (448 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-316-05624-3

In the visceral and deeply affecting companion to the Printz Award–winning Ship Breaker, Bacigalupi returns to a dark, war-torn dystopian future in which severe climatic change and years of political upheaval have left the United States a bloodied and ravaged landscape. Bands of child soldiers roam from village to village, raping, pillaging and brutally murdering, all in the name of endless civil war. Against the backdrop of this blood-soaked chaos, two unlikely allies, a crippled teenage “war maggot” and a half-man/ half-beast genetically altered killing machine, risk their lives and their freedom to save a boy forced into servitude by rebel soldiers. Mahlia and Tool (whom readers may recognize from Ship Breaker) 48

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venture deeper and deeper into the Drowned Cities, each fueled by unwavering loyalty. As they do, readers are given glimpses of proof that love and humanity can shine through even the most unimaginable darkness. Arguably, the novel’s greatest success lies in the creation of a world that is so real, the grit and decay of war and ruin will lay thick on the minds of readers long after the final page. The narrative, however, is equally well-crafted. Told in the third person, the novel alternates between Mahlia’s and Tool’s stories, allowing both characters the time and space to imprint themselves on readers’ hearts. Breathtaking. (Dystopian. 14 & Up)

WONDER SHOW

Barnaby, Hannah Houghton Mifflin (290 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 20, 2012 978-0-547-59980-9 Fourteen-year-old Portia joins a circus freak show looking for the father who abandoned her, but she finds much more. Portia’s odyssey takes place in a gothic, Depression-era Midwest. Her idyllic youth, surrounded by the stories of her extended family, ends when her widowed father leaves her with her stoic, thoroughly practical Aunt Sophia—who then turns her over to the distinctly un-homelike McGreavey Home for Wayward Girls, ruled by the sinister Mister. After her only friend commits suicide—an act Portia feels responsible for—Portia steals Mister’s bicycle and runs away to the circus, where she hopes (with no real basis) to find her father. Her way with words wins her a place pitching the ballyhoo to the rubes who visit the titular Wonder Show. The languid, sensuous third-person account is periodically punctuated by the voices of Portia and the members of the Wonder Show, giving readers poignant insight into this fragile found family. The themes that delicately thread their way through the novel—of the power of story, of family and friendship, of seeking and finding—weave themselves together into a compelling depiction of Portia’s very conscious act of self-definition: She can be, as her mentor in the ballyhoo says, whoever she wants to be. Infused with nostalgia and affection, this celebration of the deliberately constructed self will hold readers in its spell from beginning to end. (Historical fiction. 13 & up)

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“The conclusion to Black’s brilliant and unusual Curse Workers trilogy lives up to its predecessors.” from black heart

THE DEMON CATCHERS OF MILAN

Beyer, Kat Egmont USA (288 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-60684-314-7 978-1-60684-315-4 e-book To the recent crop of strong debuts in an overcrowded literary arena add this series opener, a tale of demonic possession and a centuries-old family trade in exorcism. Life in Mia’s loving, if overprotective, Italian-American family is upended when a horrifying demon enters and nearly kills her. After Giuliano Della Torre and his grandson Emilio, long-estranged relatives from Milan, arrive and drive it out, they talk Mia’s reluctant parents into letting her return to Italy with them. For her safety, she’s sequestered in the family’s home and adjacent candle shop. Studying Italian history and language, Mia comes to love her family (including some of its ghosts) and heritage, even the scary bits, but she increasingly resents confinement, longing to explore this rich new world. Clichéfree characters—patriarch Giuliano, his wife Laura, gorgeous Emilio and his sister, Francesca, especially—appear to have lives of their own beyond serving the needs of the plot. The demons themselves are haunting, multifaceted creatures that are both pathetic and extremely dangerous; the evil they project is complex and pain-ridden. Fortunately Mia demonstrates a strong gift for the family trade, which, like the novel’s other elements (the food will have readers salivating), is portrayed in exquisite, affectionate detail. This one goes to the head of the class. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

BLACK HEART

Black, Holly McElderry (304 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4424-0346-8 Series: The Curse Workers, 3 The conclusion to Black’s brilliant and unusual Curse Workers trilogy lives up to its predecessors. After everything he’s been through, it’s hard to believe Cassel has any more tricks up his sleeve: He’s figured out the truth about himself and signed on as a Fed-in-training, as has his charming and utterly unreliable older brother. But of course things don’t go as planned; there are a lot of long cons Cassel has set in play or disrupted whose ripples are still being felt. And there’s Lila, Cassel’s best friend and the love of his life, who is also the rising head of a crime family—and who hates Cassel’s guts. Black’s gotten the world of her novel down perfectly, a fascinating alternate Now in which the debate over curse workers (magic wielders) feels uncomfortably familiar (corrupt government, dispossessed citizens), and Cassel’s voice |

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never falters. If this volume has a bit less punch than the previous two, it’s only because readers know to expect the unexpected, not because the plotting is any less tight and twisty. And the conclusion, which is happier than might have been expected but not ideal and certainly not pat, is the perfect end to this gem of a trilogy. If you haven’t discovered this series yet, get going; if you’re already a fan, why are you even reading this review? (Urban fantasy/thriller. 14 & up)

GIRL OF NIGHTMARES Blake, Kendare Tor (336 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-7653-2866-3

A satisfying conclusion to ghostly Anna’s terrifying story comes with more heart-thumping suspense and clever quips as Cas tries to save her from an undeserved, dreadful fate. In the outstanding Anna Dressed in Blood (2011), the ghost, Anna, saved Cas, the ghost-killer, by dragging the voodoo monster, Obeahman, down into Hell. Now she’s back, asking Cas to rescue her, and he’s determined to do it despite all advice to the contrary. This sequel takes Cas and his friends to Britain and a secret cult that wants Cas’ athame, the magical knife that kills ghosts. There he meets Jestine, who believes she should be the next athame warrior, although unlike Cas, she wants to kill ghosts whether or not they’re dangerous to humans. She joins Cas for the final showdown against the Obeahman, who ate both Cas’ cat and his father and now holds Anna hostage. Blake provides enough background explanation to bring new readers into the story, but for full appreciation, readers should start with book one. This new author has a serious talent for action but also for delicious dry humor (“I’ve sort of been slacking off in my voodoo studies. I’ve got trigonometry, you know?”). The exciting conclusion leaves the coast clear for a whole series starring Cas or for something entirely different, whatever the author wishes. Either way, Stephen King ought to start looking over his shoulder. Pulse-pounding thrills leavened with laughter. (Paranormal thriller. 12 & up)

ABOVE

Bobet, Leah Levine/Scholastic (368 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-545-29670-0 978-0-545-39220-4 e-book In a world where “Sick’s the same as Freak Above,” only below is Safe. Safe is both adjective and noun in Matthew’s world, both the feeling and |

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h jo h n g r e e n

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

Green, John Dutton (272 pp.) $17.99 January 10, 2012 978-0-525-47881-2

The first time Hazel meets Augustus, she riffs about the inevitability of human oblivion; Augustus happens to be the kind of guy who likes that sort of thing. It’s also on both their minds. They’re smart, curious, well-read kids who happen to have cancer and who happen to fall in love. The Fault in Our Stars has sparked deep reactions in both teens and adults; John Green talked to us about why.

reflect that in the novel. I wanted them to be teenagers who happen to be living with illness and disability, rather than objects one stares at and pities and learns from. While I tried to remain conscious of the characters’ illnesses and the limitations they imposed upon their lives, they felt very much like normal kids to me—just as the kids I’ve known who were living with cancer seemed like normal kids to me.

Q: There are many references to poems, books and movies in your book, including the title. Did you know what you were going to use before you used it?

Q: Your video work and your novel work—do they satisfy the same creative urge or completely different ones?

A: Well, I knew from the beginning I wanted to write about star-crossed lovers, and it’s hard to do that without being conscious of Shakespeare, who introduced so much richness and ambiguity to romantic tragedy. But making the title of the book disagree with a famous Shakespeare quote hopefully makes it clear at the outset that the book looks at fate and love differently. I guess those ideas were in the story from the very beginning, but over many drafts the Shakespeare references changed shape and settled more into the background. The other references came while writing, but this story was written over more than a decade, and I have a terrible memory, so it’s hard to piece together what emerged when. There’s a lot in The Fault in Our Stars about the power of literature—and its limitations—and so it was important to me that Hazel in particular find comfort and challenge in reading. And poets like Eliot and Dickinson are both very thematically interesting and widely loved by teens. Q: Hazel’s relationship with her parents is the kind I’d love to have with my own kids—why is it such a good one? A: I worked for a few months in 2000 as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, and so I spent time with many dying kids and their families. Some of those families were, of course, dysfunctional, but most of them were extraordinarily loving and generous and good to each other. Teens are still teens—and Hazel fights plenty with her parents—but I wanted there to be a deep and unwavering love in that family, because that was true to my own experience. I also think loving and supportive (if imperfect) families are pretty common in real life, even if they’re a bit rare in contemporary fiction.

Q: Did you ever want to save Hazel and Augustus? Just invent a cure for cancer and let them live? A: I am concerned about the absolute and intractable injustice of the human condition, and I wanted to stare directly at that injustice without any sentiment or irony or easy comfort. The young people I’ve known who were dying found precious little comfort in cliché. And the truth is, young people die. Even if we do cure cancer—and I believe we will—young people will still die. There will always be fault to be found in the stars. I believe that a short life can also be a full life. And I believe that it is a great privilege to be able to observe the universe, if only for a little while. —Andi Diehn

A: The sick people I’ve known are every bit as alive and funny and fully human as anyone else, and I wanted to 50

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ph oto © TON KO EN E

Q: When you were writing Hazel and Augustus, did you forget they had cancer and early death in front of them? Were they ever just kids to you, or was the cancer always there?

A: The great thing about making a video is that I think of an idea in the morning, film for an hour, edit for three or four hours and then upload the video that afternoon. That evening, I’m in conversation with thousands of people about the video. That instant gratification is really enjoyable, as are the communitybuilding facets of online video: Our fans call themselves nerdfighters, because they fight for nerds, and nerdfighters have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities like Partners in Health and Save the Children. They’ve also loaned more than $1,500,000 to entrepreneurs in the developing world through kiva.org. That kind of community-based activism and philanthropy just isn’t possible in the world of fiction. On the other hand, I love writing because it’s meticulous and detail-oriented and requires a lot of sustained attention. I get to spend time thinking about every word choice and symbol and character arc. I also really love sinking all the way into a story and getting to live with it for years. And while the instantaneous feedback one gets online is great, I think the responses to a novel are much deeper and longer-lasting.

the subterranean haven built by claw-handed Atticus. Matthew is the Teller of Safe, the person who keeps everyone’s stories and retells them. Its denizens are those unwanted Above: the mentally ill, the marginal—and the Cursed. He loves the fragile, honey-haired Ariel, whom he found on patrol in the sewers around Safe and who turns into a honeybee when under stress. Bobet starts her surreal fable/adventure explosively, with a catastrophic raid by the terrifying shadows that kills leader Atticus and scatters Safe’s residents. Matthew, Ariel and two others make their way alone to a sympathetic doctor Above to regroup and, they hope, retake Safe. Above, Matthew finds his received history continually under challenge. Having been the first child born in Safe, Matthew sees it as the only reality. Occasionally interspersing Matthew’s tightly filtered, present-tense account with the Tales of Safe, the author rarely gives readers an opportunity to see what may be objectively “real,” making for a slightly claustrophobic, normality-inverting experience. While readers who long for concrete answers may be frustrated, those willing to go along with this captivating exploration of both individual and collective identity will find themselves pondering its implications long after the last page. (Fiction. 14 & up)

THE DIVINERS

Bray, Libba Little, Brown (608 pp.) $19.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-316-12611-3 1920s New York thrums with giddy life in this gripping first in a new trilogy from Printz winner Bray. Irrepressible 17-year-old Evie delights in her banishment to her Uncle Will’s care in Manhattan after she drunkenly embarrasses a peer in her Ohio hometown. She envisions glamour, fun and flappers, but she gets a great deal more in the bargain. Her uncle, the curator of a museum of the occult, is soon tapped to help solve a string of grisly murders, and Evie, who has long concealed an ability to read people’s pasts while holding an object of their possession, is eager to assist. An impressively wide net is cast here, sprawling to include philosophical Uncle Will and his odd assistant, a numbers runner and poet who dreams of establishing himself among the stars of the Harlem Renaissance, a beautiful and mysterious dancer on the run from her past and her kind musician roommate, a slick-talking pickpocket, and Evie’s seemingly demure sidekick, Mabel. Added into the rotation of third-person narrators are the voices of those encountering a vicious, otherworldly serial killer; these are utterly terrifying. Not for the faint of heart due to both subject and length, but the intricate plot and magnificently imagined details of character, dialogue and setting take hold and don’t let go. Not to be missed. (Historical/paranormal thriller. 14 & up)

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DEVINE INTERVENTION Brockenbrough, Martha Levine/Scholastic (304 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 1, 2012 978-0-545-38213-7

Jerome is no teen angel. A hell raiser when alive and killed by his cousin in eighth grade in an unfortunate archery accident, he has spent his afterlife in Soul Rehab assigned to Heidi in an attempt to win his way into Heaven. Not that he’s very committed to the notion; he lost his “Guardian Angel’s Handbook” pretty much right away, but he sort of tries. Heidi has more or less enjoyed Jerome’s company, though he could sometimes be annoying. When Heidi, having experienced unendurable humiliation in a high-school talent show, ventures onto thin ice and falls through, Jerome does his best to save her soul—as much for her own sake, he’s surprised to find, as for his. Brockenbrough devises a devilishly clever narrative, alternating Jerome’s first-person account with Heidi’s tightly focused third-person perspective. Tying both together are commandment-by-commandment excerpts (often footnoted) from Jerome’s lost handbook, each stricture slyly informing the succeeding chapter. The rules governing Jerome’s afterlife lead to frequently hysterical prose. He can’t swear, of course, so he substitutes euphemisms: “… if I weren’t so chickenchevy”; “It was a real mind-flask.” Beneath the snark, though, runs a current of devastatingly honest writing that surprises with its occasional beauty and hits home with the keenness of its insight. As the clock ticks down on Heidi’s soul, readers will be rooting for both Jerome and Heidi with all their hearts. (Paranormal adventure. 12 & up)

LOVE AND OTHER PERISHABLE ITEMS

Buzo, Laura Knopf (256 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 | Dec. 11, 2012 978-0-375-87000-2 978-0-375-98674-1 e-book 978-0-375-97000-9 PLB A sweet and scathingly funny love story (kinda) from Australia. Amelia is thoroughly crushed out on Chris. Chris pines for Michaela, though he does think Amelia is interesting. Amelia lives for her evening and weekend shifts at the local supermarket, aka “the Land of Dreams”; Chris lives for his post-work and -class benders and the hope of sex. As Chris says, “[Y]ou are fifteen and I am twenty-two, we have nothing in common socially and are at completely different stages in our lives.” Well, they are and they aren’t. Amelia is “in [the] no-man’s-land between the trenches of childhood and adulthood,” and really, so is Chris. About to finish his sociology degree, he still lives with his |

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“Gorgeous, textured prose is filled with images of strange beauty and restrained horror.” from bitterblue

parents and avoids planning beyond university. Amelia tells her side of the nonromance in a smart, wistfully perceptive present tense, while Chris’ story unfolds in his journals, written with savage, self-deprecating, foulmouthed ferocity. These accounts are interleaved, though staggered chronologically so readers move back and forth in time as the relationship develops—a brilliant juxtaposition. Alcohol-drenched encounters outside of work are, with one exception, almost irredeemably sordid (though as funny as the rest of the book); the Land of Dreams becomes a weird haven for them both, where they discuss Great Expectations and school each other in third-wave feminism. The exactly right conclusion eschews easy resolution, though there’s plenty of hope as they flounder into the future. (Fiction. 14 & up)

CALL THE SHOTS Calame, Don Candlewick (464 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-7636-5556-3

It’s nice guy Sean’s turn to shine in this hilarious follow-up to Swim the Fly (2009) and Beat the Band (2010). Sean isn’t initially swayed by his crazy friend Coop’s idea to make himself, Sean and their third amigo Matt into millionaires by shooting a low-budget horror film. But after his parents announce that they are having another baby and there is no money for a bigger house, Sean decides to sign on as screenwriter to avoid moving into his mean twin sister’s room. However, writing the movie is the least of his problems. Sean also finds himself embroiled in a terrifying romantic fourway with his new, Swiss-cheese–smelling, stalker girlfriend Evelyn, his drama crush Leyna and his sister’s best friend, the enigmatic Nessa. Sean’s well-intentioned attempts to juggle his relationships, school and the movie shoot result in the kind of outrageous mishaps that fans have come to expect from author Calame, who once again does not disappoint, with grade-A gross-outs that include a colossal bird-crap bombing and a chorizo-and-chili projectile-vomiting incident. Fearlessly foul, this consistently comical series should be required reading for all teenage boys and anyone else with a strong stomach and highly sensitive funny bone. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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BETWEEN YOU & ME Calin, Marisa Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-59990-758-1

A girl in love with the theater tells the story of her first great love in the form of a script. The entire tale unfolds as a presenttense confessional addressed to the titular (and never-named) “you” by her best friend, the dramatic Phyre. Phyre sets her scenes by describing what “you” is doing or telling “you” about what has happened in her absence, folding in snippets of dialogue. The action takes place over the course of the fall semester, as Phyre falls head over heels for Mia, their charismatic new theater instructor. It’s a textbook crush: Phyre seeks out opportunities to catch Mia alone and then muffs them (her running criticism of her social gambits is hysterical), and she interprets the slightest gesture as freighted with meaning. Her fascination is so intense she barely pauses to wonder that the object of her desire is a woman, instead throwing herself wholeheartedly into her exhilaration. The direct-address/script format works beautifully for her story; her self-absorption is so extreme that she can’t see what’s going on with “you,” but readers do, in those bits of dialogue Phyre records but does not reflect on. The play within a play that Phyre stars in (under Mia’s direction) is a tad metafictively obvious, but the device does introduce action and an intriguing and revelatory subplot. Though hamstrung by a depressingly chick-lit-y cover, this total-immersion emotional experience is one readers will both recognize and thoroughly enjoy. (Fiction. 12 & up)

BITTERBLUE

Cashore, Kristin Dial (576 pp.) $19.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-8037-3473-9 Building on the plots and themes of the award-winning Graceling (2008) and its companion Fire (2009), this rich and poignant fantasy grapples with the messy aftermath of destroying an evil overlord. Nine years after Bitterblue took the crown, the young queen and her realm are still struggling to come to terms with the monstrous legacy of her father, the insane, mind-controlling Leck. How can she “look forward,” as her advisors urge, when she cannot trust her memories of the past? Sneaking out of her castle, Bitterblue discovers that her people have not healed as much as she has been told. While “truthseekers” are determined to restore what Leck destroyed, others are willing to kill to keep their secrets hidden. Gorgeous, textured prose is filled with images of strange beauty and restrained horror. It propels an intricate narrative dense with teen

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subplots and rich in characters familiar and new. Weaving them together are all the lies: conspiracies and ciphers, fakes and false testimony, spies and thieves, disguises and deceptions, mazes and puzzles. They are lies spun from greed, shame, strategy, fear, duty—even kindness. And it is Bitterblue who, trapped in this net of deceit, must draw upon all her courage, cleverness and ferocious compassion to reveal the truth—and to care for those it shatters. Devastating and heartbreaking, this will be a disappointment for readers looking for a conventional happy ending. But those willing to take the risk will—like Bitterblue—achieve something even more precious: a hopeful beginning. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

THE CRIMSON CROWN Chima, Cinda Williams Hyperion (608 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 23, 2012 978-1-4231-4433-5 Series: Seven Realms, 4

Torture and treasure, treason and trust, and the triumph of true love: All come to fruition in the stirring conclusion to this epic fantasy series. Raisa ana’Marianna has claimed the Gray Wolf throne, but her grip is tenuous: Every faction— clans, wizards, army, flatlanders—both within and without the Fells hates all the others, and each pushes Raisa to accept its preferred candidate for consort. Meanwhile, Han Alister has taken his seat on the Wizard Council at the queen’s command, but every other member secretly wants to use him or kill him. Furthermore, there are the mysterious murders of wizards, marked with Han’s old streetlord sign; all this disarray signals a weakness that encourages invading armies from the South. Together, Han and Raisa seek the long-lost Armory of the Gifted Kings as the only way to avoid re-enacting a 1,000-yearold tragedy; but to wield such a weapon may well trigger an even greater catastrophe. Chima manages to resolve this impossibly tangled skein of politics, intrigue, history, prejudice and passion with style and grace. Grim scenes of shocking violence alternate with moments of tenderness and humor, and the high body count is balanced by the almost fairy-tale–romantic conclusion. While some of the depth and complexities of the supporting characters—along with the nuanced subtleties of their conflicting worldviews—are sacrificed to help demonize (or valorize) their respective positions, nothing can overshadow the cathartic satisfaction for those caught up in this sweeping saga. Simply brilliant. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

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THE ASSASSIN’S CURSE Clarke, Cassandra Rose Strange Chemistry (320 pp.) $9.99 paperback | Oct. 2, 2012 978-1-908844-01-9

A kick-ass pirate heroine gets into and out of (mostly into) trouble in this invigorating fantasy. Within the first five pages of this debut, Ananna of the Tanarau ditches her wedding, meant to ally her pirate clan to the Hariri. She may escape this unwanted bond, but she finds herself in another, far more powerful one when she saves the life of Naji, the assassin hired by the Hariri to bring her back or kill her. Now magically connected to the scarred blood magician, she attracts the collateral attention of malignant Otherworldly powers. If she wants any chance at a future that includes her own ship—hell, any future at all—she must quest with Naji for a cure to the curse that binds them together. Clarke’s debut harkens back to the best in fantasy/adventure, offering rock-solid worldbuilding, satisfyingly perilous obstacles and a protagonist whose charismatic ’tude goes way beyond spunk. Ananna’s voice grabs readers from the beginning (“I ain’t never been one to trust beautiful people, and Tarrin of the Hariri was the most beautiful man I ever saw”) and doesn’t let go. Her wry, agreeably foulmouthed (“Sure, sirens are a pain in the ass”) narration is equally smart and funny, incorporating both trenchant observations and frankly beautiful phrasing that never misses a step (“I hadn’t even recognized the hope for what it was until it got dragged away from me”). A ripsnorting series opener; may the sequels arrive soon. (Fantasy. 13 & up)

THE WICKED AND THE JUST Coats, J. Anderson Harcourt (352 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-547-68837-4

Two girls of very different degree are brought together unwillingly by the English conquest of Wales. Cecily is in a pet at having to leave the home of her youth—where her mother is buried—and relocate to the Welsh frontier, but her father is a younger son. He will take a burgage in Caernarvon, recently conquered by Edward I. In exchange for a home, he will help to keep the King’s peace. Cecily hates Caernarvon. She hates its weather, its primitive appointments and its natives, especially Gwinny, the servant girl who doesn’t obey, and the young man who stares at her. It would be easy to dismiss this book as a Karen Cushman knockoff; Cecily’s voice certainly has a pertness that recalls Catherine, Called Birdy. But there’s more of an edge, conveyed both in the appalling ease with which Cecily dismisses the Welsh as subhuman and in Gwinny’s fierce parallel narrative. “I could kill the brat a hundred different teen

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“Modern readers…will be completely caught up in Sophie’s nightmare and will gain an understanding that only the best historical fiction can provide.” from the fitzosbornes at war

ways.” Never opting for the easy characterization, debut author Coats compellingly re-creates this occupation from both sides. It all leads to an ending so brutal and unexpected it will take readers’ breath away even as it makes them think hard about the title. Brilliant: a vision of history before the victors wrote it. (historical note) (Historical fiction. 12 & up)

REACHED

Condie, Ally Dutton (528 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 13, 2012 978-0-525-42366-9 Series: Matched Trilogy, 3 While staying true to the science fiction and romance at the core of Matched (2010) and Crossed (2011), the trilogy’s breathless finale blossoms into a medical thriller too, adding breadth and resonance. Cassia, Ky and Xander are far apart. Ky unenthusiastically flies air ships for the Rising, an enigmatic organization poised to overturn the Society. The Rising sends Cassia to work from the inside, so she sorts data for the Society, awaits the Rising’s instruction and trades poetry underground. Xander’s a Society medical Official who uses his position to subtly immunize infants against the forced-forgetfulness tablets that the Society regularly gives adults. The three take turns narrating in first-person present, revealing tantalizing information gaps: What does one character wonder while another knows? What do readers not know yet? A plague breaks out, mutates and becomes a pandemic—which aspects were intentional, and on whose part? Poems (Tennyson, Dickinson, Thomas) and a painting (Sargent) figure heavily and beautifully on both symbolic and literal levels. Is the Rising trustworthy? Can a living human also be an archetype? Condie’s prose is immediate and unadorned, with sudden pings of lush lyricism. Her protagonists are no run-of-the-mill romance triangle, her forms of activism (art, medicine) rich. Each character is differently strong and differently wounded. With reveals seeming to arrive on almost every page, prepare to stay up all night. (author’s note referencing poems and paintings) (Science fiction/romance. 13 & up)

THE FITZOSBORNES AT WAR

Cooper, Michelle Knopf (560 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 | Oct. 9, 2012 978-0-375-87050-7 978-0-307-97404-4 e-book 978-0-375-97050-4 PLB Series: The Montmaray Journals, 3 War has been declared, and the young, royal, exiled FitzOsbornes are immediately in the thick of things as Cooper’s Montmaray Journals trilogy comes to its conclusion. |

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Their island kingdom of Montmaray was captured by the Nazis several years earlier, and they have been living in London ever since. Teenagers at the start of the war, they are flung headlong into adulthood; Simon and King Toby are in the Royal Air Force, Princess Veronica does something secret in the Foreign Office, and Princess Sophie works in the Food Ministry, where she churns out information regarding rationing. It is her voice, as true and clear as ever in her long-running journal, that paints a detailed and nuanced portrait of life in the madness of war, with its deprivations, bombings and disruptions; devastating damage to life, property and spirit; constant fear, heartbreaking loss and brief moments of giddy laughter. The family is foremost in the narrative, but the wider cast of characters includes Churchill, the Kennedys and several other historical figures. Seamlessly weaving fiction with fact, Cooper makes it all personal. Modern readers, whether or not they know more than a few basic facts about that era, will be completely caught up in Sophie’s nightmare and will gain an understanding that only the best historical fiction can provide. (Readers are advised not to peek at the family tree, as it contains spoilers.) Absorbing, compelling and unforgettable. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12 & up)

AFTER THE SNOW

Crockett, S. D. Feiwel & Friends (304 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 27, 2012 978-0-312-64169-6 Debut author Crockett’s poetic firstperson narrative depicts an adolescent’s coming-of-age amid wartime havoc and an unforgiving, possibly post-apocalyptic winter. When Willo’s family vanishes from their wintry cabin, he sets out on his own to find them, leaving his home in the hills for the nearby town, which is undergoing a Nazi-like occupation. The war is a nebulous monster; though Crockett alludes to World War II, she never fully explicates the novel’s time frame, which may frustrate some readers. Willo’s inventive argot is part-urban vernacular and part-forester twang, and though it offers no clues as to setting or time, it conveys exceptional metaphors that evoke nature and the elements. People Willo has trusted betray him in the face of scarce food and the authorities’ hunt for a faceless resistance, but he perseveres, seizing opportunities to earn his bread and doggedly pursuing information about his father. On his journey, he meets a young girl who turns out to possess unexpected significance in the political landscape, figuring even in his own legacy, a thing he discovers in his difficult search. Willo endures cruel brutality, but Crockett renders in him an intense psychological transformation that is authentic to his character and his circumstances, culminating in discovery of his own voice and vision. A sentimental tale of hardships, resilience and firsttime experiences that illustrates a universal truism: Hope springs eternal in the young. (Fiction. 12 & up) |

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“Even when events take a dark and gut-punchingly inevitable turn, the novel remains at its heart a story of survival and of carving out space even in a world that wants one’s annihilation.” from the miseducation of cameron post

THE GIRL IN THE CLOCKWORK COLLAR

Cross, Kady Harlequin Teen (416 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 1, 2012 978-0-373-21053-4 Series: The Steampunk Chronicles, 2 A steampunk adventure in which an omniscient narrator delves into multiple heads and a quartet of friends take lurid risks to save their fifth counterpart. Fin de siècle London meets New York when Finley, Griffin, Emily and Sam take passage on a dirigible after a local villain, Dalton, absconds with their friend Jasper. Cross (The Girl in the Steel Corset, 2011, etc.) deftly weaves storylines together, fostering each character’s romantic aspirations and nicely complicating them with low social station, part-machine composition or some other hindrance to bliss. The titular girl is Mei, and the collar she wears is one of many newfangled inventions readers can explore. Several others come through the vehicle of supporting cast member Nikola Tesla, whose gadgets come to life with Griffin’s paranormal powers. It is, of course, an uncanny invention that impels Dalton to kidnap and exploit Jasper in the first place, as well as the familiar desire for riches. The juxtaposition of polar-opposite settings—rough-and-tumble Five Points and the opulence of the Waldorf Astoria, for instance—makes for playful diversity among characters and intriguing sources of tension. Cross nails the old dialects of New York, England and Ireland, imbuing her world with texture and authenticity. Surprising, vivid and cohesive—the work of a pro. (Steampunk. 13 & up)

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

danforth, emily m. Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-0-06-202056-7 Set in rural Montana in the early 1990s, this lesbian coming-of-age story runs the gamut from heart-rending to triumphant, epic to mundane. The story opens just after Cameron’s first kiss with a girl and just before the life-changing news that Cameron’s parents have died in a car accident. Cam is 12 when readers first meet her, but several years pass over the course of the book’s nearly 500 pages. Carefully crafted symbols—a dollhouse into which Cam puts stolen trinkets and mementos, the lake where her mother once escaped disaster only to die there 30 years later—provide a backbone for the story’s ever-shifting array of characters and episodes, each rendered in vibrant, almost memoirlike detail. The tense relationship between Cam’s sexuality and her family and community’s religious beliefs is handled with particular nuance, as are her romantic and 56

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sexual entanglements, from a summer fling with an out, proud and smug Seattlite to an all-encompassing love for a seemingly straight female friend. Even when events take a dark and gutpunchingly inevitable turn, the novel remains at its heart a story of survival and of carving out space even in a world that wants one’s annihilation. Rich with detail and emotion, a sophisticated read for teens and adults alike. (Fiction. 14 & up)

LIA’S GUIDE TO WINNING THE LOTTERY David, Keren Frances Lincoln (352 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-1-84780-331-3

Lia Latimer is more than ready to take her future into her own hands when she wins £8 million in the lottery. She’ll drop out of school, buy a flat, leave her annoying family behind. What could go wrong? Plenty, of course, and watching it unfold in this astringent, insightful satire is a major treat. Her father’s struggling bakery needs a cash infusion; her mother would like a boob job; sister Natasha longs for singing lessons. Jack (the winning ticket was his 16th-birthday present to Lia) wants an Italian motorbike; his mother demands half Lia’s winnings. Some seek support for worthy causes, but unlike Shazia, who won’t let Lia give her anything (Islam rejects gambling), most classmates expect presents. Financing their shopping spree (£7,000) doesn’t prevent a Facebook-fueled anti-Lia movement. Her romance with mysterious, gorgeous Raf is a bright spot— unless he’s just after her winnings. Lia (self-centered control freak, yes, but smart, honest and likable) makes a refreshingly assertive heroine for affluenza-ridden times, discovering that too many choices can be almost as immobilizing as having none. The text is peppered with British terms and cultural references, but readers raised on Harry Potter should have no problems. Tart, funny and fast-moving, with a touch of rueful realism and a lot of heart. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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VESSEL

Durst, Sarah Beth McElderry (432 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-1-4424-2376-3 When a summoning goes awry, Liyana must try to save her people and learn how to live for herself, in this sweeping adventure. Chosen as a “vessel” to host the Goat Clan’s goddess, Bayla, and abandoned when Bayla doesn’t come, Liyana finds herself alone in the desert. Korbyn, god of the Raven Clan, rescues Liyana and provides her with a purpose: find the four other vessels who are also missing deities. Soon, Liyana and Korbyn pick up stalwart Fennik (horse god Sendar), princess-y Pia (silk goddess Oyri) and angry Raan (scorpion goddess Maara). Besides the desert’s many dangers, the ragtag group faces the massed army of the Crescent Empire, led by a young Emperor and his malicious magician, Mulaf. The tribes need their gods to save them from illness, starvation and drought, but the gods need to possess vessels to work magic—an arrangement whose logic several characters begin to question. Liyana is self-sacrificing but not a saint; stubborn, loyal and curious, she finds new reasons to live even as she faces death. Durst offers a meditation on leadership and power and a vivid story set outside the typical Western European fantasy milieu. From the gripping first line, a fast-paced, thought-provoking and stirring story of sacrifice. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

MY NAME IS PARVANA

Ellis, Deborah Groundwood (176 pp.) $16.95 | $14.95 e-book | Oct. 1, 2012 978-1-55498-297-4 978-1-55498-299-8 e-book Series: Breadwinner Quartet, 4

In a follow-up that turns the Breadwinner Trilogy into a quartet, 15-year-old Parvana is imprisoned and interrogated as a suspected terrorist in Afghanistan. When her father’s shoulder bag is searched, Parvana’s captors find little of apparent value—a notebook, pens and a chewed-up copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Parvana refuses to talk; her interrogator doesn’t even know if she can speak. The interrogator reads aloud the words in her notebook to decide if the angry written sentiments of a teenage girl can be evidence of guilt. Parvana is stoic, her keen mind ever alert as she has to “stand and listen to her life being spouted back at her,” a life in a land where warplanes are as “common as crows,” where someone was always “tasting dirt, having their eardrums explode and seeing their world torn apart.” The interrogation, the words of the notebook and the effective third-person narration combine for a thoroughly tense and engaging portrait of a girl and her |

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country. This passionate volume stands on its own, though readers new to the series and to Ellis’ overall body of work will want to read every one of her fine, important novels. Readers will learn much about the war in Afghanistan even as they cheer on this feisty protagonist. (author’s note) (Fiction. 11 & up)

PINNED

Flake, Sharon G. Scholastic (240 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Oct. 1, 2012 978-0-545-05718-9 978-0-545-46984-5 e-book Two unlikely teens find a connection despite the reluctance of one and the vastly different life obstacles they confront. Autumn Knight is good at several things: She’s a great friend, a terrific cook and a fiercely competitive wrestler, the only girl on her team. She is not good at reading or most of her other school subjects. Despite this, she is drawn to the smartest boy in school and determined that he will like her in return. Adonis Miller, severely physically disabled since birth, wants no part of Autumn. She is everything he hates: “I despise her. Nothing about her appeals to me. All those muscles. Not to mention her IQ. I’m sure it’s exceptionally low.” Since he was a little boy, he has striven to be the best at whatever he attempts, from academics to school leadership. His role as manager of the wrestling team often brings him into contact with Autumn, and he has trouble reconciling the successful athlete with the irritating girl who haunts his dreams. This brilliantly realized story is told alternately in their two distinctive voices, and readers will cheer Autumn’s spirit and Adonis’ drive. The narrative is further enriched by intriguing secondary characters, including Autumn’s best friend Patricia (aka Peaches), who has her own secrets, and the loving parents and caring teachers of both teens. An uplifting story that convincingly celebrates the power of perseverance. (Fiction. 14 & up)

DON’T TURN AROUND

Gagnon, Michelle Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-06-210290-4 978-0-06-210292-8 e-book Teenage hackers Noa and Peter band together for vengeance and discover an inconceivable conspiracy. Sixteen-year-old computer whiz Noa Torson has escaped the Child Protective Services system by creating a fake foster family that includes a reclusive, freelance IT-guy of a father who draws a tidy salary working “from home”; she thinks she’s safe. When she wakes up in a hospitallike operating theater with no memory of how she |

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h m at t h e w q u i c k BOY21 Quick, Matthew Little, Brown (256 pp.) $17.99 March 5, 2012 978-0-316-12797-4

In Boy21, two teenage boys come together because of tragedy and stay together out of necessity; as friends, Finley and Russ, both basketball players, have a better chance of overcoming the odds against them in their rough town. Matthew Quick discusses the relationship between his two characters and the importance of all the different teams on which we find ourselves. Q: Why do you think books about friendships among teenage boys are important? A: One of things I noticed when I was teaching high school is that teenage boys find that they really rely on their guy friends. I coach high-school basketball, and I notice that a lot of the teenage boys I work with have a very difficult time navigating those friendships in terms of expressing themselves. They love their guy friends but have trouble talking about that. I remember staying up all night talking about religion, about where we were going after high school, just trying to figure out life. I remember how important those conversations were. When you’re in your teens, you’re trying to establish your way in the world, free and clear of your family—the first thing you turn to is your guy friends. A lot of writers cover male/female relationships in literature, but I do think we need to write more about guy friendships. Q: Sometimes Finley refers to Russ as Russ and sometimes he calls him Boy21. Why does he go back and forth? A: I think Finley realizes the duality of people’s existence. He recognizes it right away with Russ. I think he sees it the first time when they celebrate Russ’ birthday and have cupcakes on the roof. He realizes this is a different side, this isn’t the mask, I’m seeing the real Russ. Finley is a very intuitive young man, he’s very emotional, but because of the fact that he played sports, he’s a guy, he lives in a rough neighborhood, those aren’t necessarily the traits that get recognized, never mind celebrated.

up—we were always on the border of that, we knew that was close by: guns and people getting hurt and awful things happening. I was always fascinated by that idea of location, how you can be one town over and be in the midst of this bad situation or you can rise up and move away. Q: You emphasize the concept of a team, but Finley’s team doesn’t support him when he needs it most. A: As a coach, I do a lot of talking about the good qualities of being on a team. I think sports are great for kids, but you need to sacrifice a lot of your identity when you’re on a team. I watch young kids struggle. We put so much emphasis on being part of a team for 3-4 months, to the point where kids won’t hang out with other friends, they drop their girlfriends—in some ways that’s great, but as an artist and writer, I know my journey has always been one of leaving the herd, just like Finley. In my life that has been the most important part of battle: To be a writer I had to be my own team, not my family’s team, not my friends’ team, but “Team Q.” —Andi Diehn

Q: Belmont is more like a terrifying character than the setting of the novel—did you grow up someplace like it?

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ph oto © A licia Be s s et t e

A: I grew up in a blue-collar town, but it wasn’t at all like Belmont, I didn’t have to face the problems Finley faced. That being said, there were some blue-collar problems. I had a friend whose dad was a bookie, there were guns in the house; I had a couple friends whose dads were in and out of jail. I felt a little bit of that, but my family was not like that at all. You know, growing up in the south Jersey area you’re so close to Philadelphia, and Camden had the highest murder rate in country when I was growing kirkus.com

got there, she doesn’t take the doctors’ lame explanation that she was in a car accident and uses her smarts to escape. Meanwhile, Boston child-of-privilege Peter pokes around his father’s files and is interrupted by armed thugs who break down the door and storm off with his computer (leaving a warning for his parents). Peter enlists his hacktivist group /ALLIANCE/ (of which Noa is a member) to, first, research the subject of those files and then to attack his attackers via the Net. The attack only serves to dig the teens in deeper when they uncover a frightening conspiracy of human experimentation and corporate malfeasance that could mean a quick death for them both. Adult author Gagnon’s YA debut is a pulse-pounding scary-great read. The strong characters and dystopian day-after-tomorrow setting will have teens begging for more. The slightly open end leaving the possibility (but not necessity) of a sequel will rankle some; others will just breathlessly smile. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for preteens and teens, a surefire hit. (Thriller. 12-16)

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOU AND ME George, Madeleine Viking (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-670-01128-5

A novel with alternating narrators takes an unusually interesting twist due to one of the character’s habitual tendency toward self-delusion. Self-proclaimed misfit and outspoken manifesto-author Jesse deals daily with the hazards of being out and proud in high school. She’s also carrying on a secret affair with image-conscious Emily, the girlfriend of a popular boy at school. Meeting weekly in the bathroom of the local public library, the two experience an inexplicable chemistry, even though Emily will barely acknowledge Jesse at any other time. Switching perspective among Emily, Jesse and a third girl, Esther, this heartbreaking tale is powerfully raw in its exploration of attraction and shame. Jesse hides her relationship from her warmly quirky and accepting parents not because it is with a girl, but because she knows they will disapprove of its secrecy. Readers will ache for her, and they will be torn between rage and pity toward Emily, so intent on forcing herself into a normative role that she cannot admit the truth even to herself. Clever phrasing, a decided political bent against big-box stores and characters who gently poke fun at various stereotypes round out this work of contemporary fiction. While in the end there are some plotlines left untied in slice-of-life fashion, the bittersweet resolution of the main conflict is deeply satisfying. (Fiction. 13 & up)

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THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

Green, John Dutton (272 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 10, 2012 978-0-525-47881-2 He’s in remission from the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. She’s fighting the brown fluid in her lungs caused by tumors. Both know that their time is limited. Sparks fly when Hazel Grace Lancaster spies Augustus “Gus” Waters checking her out across the room in a grouptherapy session for teens living with cancer. He’s a gorgeous, confident, intelligent amputee who always loses video games because he tries to save everyone. She’s smart, snarky and 16; she goes to community college and jokingly calls Peter Van Houten, the author of her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents. He asks her over, and they swap novels. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his—based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance. From their trip to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive Van Houten to their hilariously flirty repartee, readers will swoon on nearly every page. Green’s signature style shines: His carefully structured dialogue and razor-sharp characters brim with genuine intellect, humor and desire. He takes on Big Questions that might feel heavy-handed in the words of any other author: What do oblivion and living mean? Then he deftly parries them with humor: “My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched.” Dog-earing of pages will no doubt ensue. Green seamlessly bridges the gap between the present and the existential, and readers will need more than one box of tissues to make it through Hazel and Gus’ poignant journey. (Fiction. 15 & up)

THE WARRIOR’S HEART Becoming a Man of Compassion and Courage Greitens, Eric Houghton Mifflin (208 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 9, 2012 978-0-547-86852-3

Selecting high and low points from his experiences as a child, college student, teacher, refugee-camp worker, amateur boxer, Rhodes scholar, Navy SEAL and worker with disabled vets, Greitens both charts his philosophical evolution and challenges young readers to think about “a better way to walk in the world.” Revising extracts from his memoir The Heart and the Fist |

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

A luminous Renaissance adventure of bravery and beauty One of Kirkus’ Best Teen Books of 2012

★“A rare, rewarding, sumptuous exploration of artistic passion.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred “An elegant retelling of that

old, crucial story of finding one’s place in the world, set against a vivid evocation of the Italian Renaissance.” —Robin McKinley “It has adventure, arguments, soul-searching, villains, romance, hair-breadth escapes, dastardly betrayals, and girl power. I simply galloped through it.” —Jane Yolen “Combines the spiritual with a hint of the supernatural . . . A lovely read.” —Megan Whalen Turner

Victoria Strauss K PASSION BLUE November K Teen Fiction K 978-0-7614-6230-9 K $17.99 Also available on audio

www.brillianceaudio.com/amazonchildrenspublishing • 800-648-2312

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“Grossman’s love for her story seeps into every page, locking readers into the narrative.” from a world away

(2011) and recasting them into a more chronological framework, the author tells a series of adventuresome tales. These are set in locales ranging from Duke University to Oxford, from a lowincome boxing club to camps in Rwanda and Croatia, from a group home for street children in Bolivia to a barracks hit by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Prefacing each chapter with a provocative “Choose Your Own Adventure”–style scenario (“What do you do?”), he describes how similar situations ultimately led him to join the military, impelled by a belief that it’s better to help and protect others from danger than to provide aid after the fact. What sets his odyssey apart from Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin’s I Am a SEAL Team Six Warrior (2012) and most other soldiers’ stories is an unusual ability to spin yarns infused with not only humor and memorable lines (SEAL training’s notorious Hell Week was “the best time I never want to have again”), but cogent insights about character and making choices that don’t come across as heavy-handed advice. An uncommon (to say the least) coming-of-age, retraced with well-deserved pride but not self-aggrandizement, and as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. (endnotes, bibliography [not seen]) (Memoir. 14-18)

A WORLD AWAY Grossman, Nancy Hyperion (400 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-4231-5153-1

This sensitive debut grabs hearts right away and doesn’t let go. Eliza, a 16-year-old Amish girl, struggles against the restrictions of her culture. She loves her family and friends but yearns to see the modern world. She gets her chance when a visiting woman offers her a summertime nanny job, but she must convince her reluctant mother to agree. Amish teens are allowed a “rumspringa,” a time of some freedom before they decide to accept baptism and join the permanent community, but her mother’s vision of this “running-wild” time is very different from Eliza’s. At last Eliza’s mother consents, and the girl moves with a modern wardrobe to Chicago, where she encounters the wonders of movies, computers and microwaves. Soon she meets Josh and begins dating, also entering the world of modern girl rivalries. Later, Eliza will meet someone from her past and learn more about her mother than she could have imagined. Throughout, Eliza faces a terrible choice: Which world will she join, and which will she leave forever? The author writes with simple sentences that fit Eliza’s simple way of life and convey her innocence. Readers experience their own world through the girl’s naïve eyes, marveling at technology, experiencing new relationships, and worrying through her difficulties. Grossman’s love for her story seeps into every page, locking readers into the narrative. She produces a heartfelt tale that will be difficult for readers to resist. Simply lovely. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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MISTER DEATH’S BLUE-EYED GIRLS Hahn, Mary Downing Clarion (336 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-547-76062-9

The high school year is almost over, there’s a party in the park, and Mister Death will soon be there, rifle in hand. It’s June 1956, and the kids in the park are dancing to Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and the Platters. Mister Death is there too, a boy in a tree, rifle in hand. Two girls, Cheryl and Bobbi Jo, never make it to school the next day, their bloody bodies found in the park where they were shot. Hahn’s well-constructed story traces the effects of a crime on everyone involved, including Buddy Novak, accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Multiple perspectives offer readers a chance to view the crime from various angles. A third-person narration follows the machinations of Mister Death, while a first-person voice is perfect for developing narrator Nora Cunningham’s character, a 16-year-old girl full of questions and doubts and who ultimately doesn’t believe the gossip mill that pins the blame on Buddy. Diary entries, letters and first-person accounts from secondary characters add depth and sophistication to the tale, letting readers figure out for themselves what really happened. An engrossing exploration of how a murder affects a community. (Historical thriller. 12 & up)

THE GIRL IS TROUBLE Haines, Kathryn Miller Roaring Brook (336 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-59643-610-7

Teen detective Iris Anderson struggles to solve parallel mysteries while coming to terms with her Jewish identity in World War II–era New York City in this engrossing follow-up to The Girl is Murder (2011). It’s only been a month since Iris helped her gumshoe dad solve the disappearance of one of her classmates. Now her father is reluctantly allowing her to assist him on cases, but when Iris finds some disturbing crime-scene photos of her deceased mother in his office, she almost regrets her decision. Iris had been told her mother committed suicide. The photos indicate foul play, though, and Iris is determined to find out the truth. Meanwhile, she has also been hired by the Jewish Student Federation at school to uncover who is leaving anti-Semitic notes in members’ lockers. The investigation stirs up Iris’s feelings of guilt over her own Jewish heritage, which she has essentially ignored. Emotionally distraught and personally involved in both cases, Iris is a prime target for bad-boy Benny’s romantic overtures. But are his intentions as sweet as they seem? Or is Iris |

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

“A 20th-century teen artist and 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud transcend time and place in this luminous paean to the transformative power of art.” from radiant days

flirting with danger? Haines delves deeper into Iris’ intriguing character in this compelling, self-contained sequel while doing a bang-up job of maintaining the ace period setting. A solid addition to what is turning into a swell series. (Historical mystery. 12 & up)

GIRL MEETS BOY

Halls, Kelly Millner—Ed. Chronicle (204 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 1, 2012 978-1-4521-0264-1 This conceptually unique collection of short story pairings by a constellation of teen-literature stars explores a variety of relationship types as the respective male and female involved in each one

experience them. In the first, a witty teen seeking to stop cheating on his girlfriends is drawn into a messy sexual relationship with a troubled (but hot) girl who is an abuse survivor. In another, a likable, tough girl muscles in on a bully who is harassing the object of her crush. In the third, a gay 17-year-old agrees to an in-person meeting with an online-chat buddy in a tale both sad and sweet. Two separate stories examine the strain felt by couples of different ethnic backgrounds as they struggle with prejudice and familial expectations. Finally, a boy re-encounters someone with whom he’s long been enamored, only to discover she’s undergone a transformation. Common themes—that are less about gender-based perceptions than they are about teens struggling to be seen and loved for who they truly are—knit these stories together. Each of the authors excels at creating vibrant, sympathetic, honest characters with voices that will appeal to older teens, male and female alike. A superb offering—and therefore a shame that its cover design of a boy and girl in a clinch makes it look like a runof-the mill romance, which may limit its appeal. (Short stories. 14 & up)

HAVE A NICE DAY

Halpern, Julie Feiwel & Friends (336 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 16, 2012 978-0-312-60660-2 Biting wit makes this quest for suburban normalcy in the face of depression and anxiety both laugh-out-loud funny and immensely intelligent. In Get Well Soon (2007), Anna spent three weeks in a mental hospital, unwillingly. Now she faces her first three weeks back at home—Dad retaining his “classically trained dick” attitude, Mom riddled with “wuss issues”—and back at school. She’s insecure about where she’s been and fears the in-class panic attacks and bowel 62

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symptoms that plagued her earlier. She postpones writing to hospital romance Justin, unsure what to say. Instead, Anna focuses on art class, funky clothing and her peers in outpatient therapy. Her first-person narration brims with humor and raunchiness: “The dark wood that made up the library’s décor screamed 1976 academia, but the dainty sentiment of ‘EB sucks cock’ scratched into the wood brought a modern feel.” As life improves, she questions sharply which aspects of treatment— or life—are really helping. Anna finds Holden Caulfield (Halpern employs layered and alluring Catcher in the Rye references); boys find her. Characters and observations are impressively original. The only staleness is relentless textual insistence that Anna’s weight loss—born of “crappy mental hospital cafeteria food, depression, [and] anxiety”—is crucial to, and the same thing as, her recovery. Aside from the too-anxious-to-eat valorization, fresh as a daisy and sharp as a tack. (Fiction. 12-17)

RADIANT DAYS Hand, Elizabeth Viking (272 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 2, 2012 978-0-670-01135-3

A 20th-century teen artist and 19thcentury French poet Arthur Rimbaud transcend time and place in this luminous paean to the transformative power of art. In September 1977, 18-year-old Merle leaves rural Virginia to attend the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. Her drawings catch the eye of drawing instructor Clea, who initiates a romantic relationship with Merle. Overwhelmed by the sophisticated urban art scene, Merle drifts out of school. When Clea drops her, a homeless Merle desperately spray-paints her signature sun-eye graffiti across the city until she encounters a mercurial tramp who mystically connects her with the visionary Rimbaud, in the bloom of his artistic powers at age 16. Incredulous over their stunning time travel, Merle and Rimbaud recognize they are kindred spirits who live to create. Hand deftly alternates between Merle’s first-person, past-tense story and a thirdperson account of Rimbaud during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872, laced with excerpts from his poems and letters. Suffused with powerful images of light, this intensely lyrical portrait of two androgynous young artists who magically traverse a century to briefly escape their equally disturbing worlds expands the themes of artistic isolation and passion Hand first introduced in Illyria (2010). An impressive blend of biography and magical realism. (author’s notes; select bibliography) (Fantasy. 14 & up)

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SERAPHINA

Hartman, Rachel Random House (480 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-0-375-86656-2 978-0-375-89658-3 e-book 978-0-375-96656-9 PLB In Hartman’s splendid prose debut, humans and dragons—who can take human form but not human feeling— have lived in uneasy peace for 40 years. The dragons could destroy the humans, but they are too fascinated by them. As musician Seraphina describes it, attempting to educate the princess, humans are like cockroaches to dragons, but interesting. As the anniversary of the treaty approaches, things fall apart: The crown prince has been murdered, antidragon sentiment is rising, and in the midst of it all, an awkward, gifted, observant girl unexpectedly becomes central to everything. Hartman has remixed her not-so-uncommon story and pseudo-Renaissance setting into something unexpected, in large part through Seraphina’s voice. By turns pedantic, lonely, scared, drily funny and fierce, Seraphina brings readers into her world and imparts details from the vast (a religion of saints, one of whom is heretical) to the minute (her music, in beautifully rendered detail). The wealth of detail never overwhelms, relayed as it is amid Seraphina’s personal journey; half-human and halfdragon, she is anathema to all and lives in fear. But her growing friendship with the princess and the princess’ betrothed, plus her unusual understanding of both humans and dragons, all lead to a poignant and powerful acceptance of herself. Dragon books are common enough, but this one is head and talons above the rest. (cast of characters, glossary) (Fantasy. 12 & up)

THE OBSIDIAN BLADE

Hautman, Pete Candlewick (320 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5403-0 978-0-7636-5972-1 e-book Series: The Klaatu Diskos, 1 Vivid imagination and deft storytelling make for refreshing speculative fiction in this time-travel tale. Tucker Feye is an ordinary teenage boy, leading an ordinary, near-idyllic small-town American life—but that’s before he starts seeing the “disks.” Once the mysterious shimmering phenomena appear, Tucker’s preacher father vanishes, then returns with a strange teenage girl and without his faith; Tucker’s mother loses her sanity, and eventually, both parents disappear. After moving in with his (previously unknown) Uncle Kosh, the really weird stuff starts happening. However, after a riveting opening scene, the narrative seems |

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to slow to a crawl, but the thorough characterization and careful worldbuilding pay off spectacularly once Tucker discovers that the disks are gateways through time and space. Hautman doesn’t make things easy for his readers: As Tucker bounces through historical crisis points past and future, short chapters and steadily ratcheting stakes present life-threatening situations and bizarre personages at a dizzying pace (most of them already-familiar characters with new names or under different guises). That this remains intriguing rather than confusing is a credit to the sure-handed plotting and crisp prose, equally adept with flashes of snarky wit and uncomfortable questions of faith, identity and destiny. Less satisfying are the climactic cliffhangers, which reveal that the entire story is but a setup for the rest of the series. Part science fiction, part adventure, part mystery, but every bit engrossing; be sure to start the hold list for the sequel. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

THE HERO’S GUIDE TO SAVING YOUR KINGDOM

Healy, Christopher Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-06-211743-4 Instead of finding Happily Ever After with their princesses, four Princes Charming (Prince Duncan insists they pluralize the noun, not adjective) must team up on a farcical quest to save their kingdoms. The bards have the story details wrong, and each Prince Charming that rescues a princess actually has a name. Bold, party-crashing Cinderella wants adventure more than sheltered Prince Frederic does. Prince Gustav’s pride is still badly damaged from having needed Rapunzel’s teary-eyed rescue. Through Sleeping Beauty, Prince Liam learns kissing someone out of enchanted sleep doesn’t guarantee compatibility, much to the citizens of both kingdoms’ ire. Although she loves wacky Prince Duncan, Snow White needs some solitude. The princesin-turmoil unite to face ridiculous, dangerous obstacles and another figure underserved by bards’ storytelling: Zaubera, the witch from Rapunzel’s story. Angered at remaining nameless, she plots to become infamous enough, through ever-escalating evil, that bards will be forced to name her in their stories. The fairy-tale world is tongue-in-cheek but fleshed out, creating its own humor rather than relying on pop-culture references. In this debut, Healy juggles with pitch-perfect accuracy, rendering the princes as goobers with good hearts and individual strengths, keeping them distinct and believable. Inventive and hilarious, with laugh-out-loud moments on every page. (Fantasy. 8 & up)

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FRIENDS WITH BOYS

Hicks, Faith Erin Illus. by Hicks, Faith Erin First Second/Roaring Brook (224 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 28, 2012 978-1-59643-556-8 Nervous, home-schooled by her absent and much-missed mom and saddled with three adored older brothers— and a ghost—Maggie starts high school. Largely but not entirely left by her doting upper-grade sibs (who had “first days” of their own) to sink or swim, Maggie starts off in lonely isolation but quickly finds two great friends in Mohawk-wearing, multiply pierced, exuberantly logorrheic classmate Lucy and her quieter (but also Mohawk-topped) brother Alistair. Simmering complications soon reach a boil as Maggie discovers that Alistair and her own oldest brother Daniel have some sort of bad history, and on a more eldritch note, a woman’s ghost that Maggie had occasionally seen in the nearby graveyard takes to floating into her house and right up to her face. Filling monochrome ink-and-wash panels with wonderfully mobile faces, expressively posed bodies, wordless conversations in meaningful glances, funny banter and easy-to-read visual sequences ranging from hilarious to violent, Hicks crafts an upbeat, uncommonly engaging tale rich in humor, suspense, and smart, complex characters. Readers will definitely want to have, know or be Maggie’s brothers—but she herself proves to be no slouch when it comes to coping with change and taking on challenges. (Graphic fantasy. 11-13)

MOONBIRD

Hoose, Phillip Farrar, Straus and Giroux (160 pp.) $21.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-374-30468-3 As he did in The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (2004), Hoose explores the tragedy of extinction through a single bird species, but there is hope for survival in this story, and that hope is pinned on understanding the remarkable longevity of a single bird. B95 is a 4-ounce, robin-sized shorebird, a red knot of the subspecies rufa. Each February he joins a flock that lifts off from Tierra del Fuego and heads for breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, 9,000 miles away. Late in the summer, he begins the return journey. Scientists call him Moonbird because, in the course of his astoundingly long lifetime of nearly 20 years, he has flown the distance to the moon and halfway back. B95 can fly for days without eating or sleeping but eventually must land to refuel and rest. Recent changes, however, at refueling stations along his migratory circuit, most caused by human activity, have reduced the available food. Since 1995, when B95 was captured and banded, the rufa population has collapsed by 66

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nearly 80 percent. Scientists want to know why this one bird survives year after year when so many others do not. In a compelling, vividly detailed narrative, Hoose takes readers around the hemisphere, showing them the obstacles rufa red knots face, introducing a global team of scientists and conservationists, and offering insights about what can be done to save them before it’s too late. Meticulously researched and told with inspiring prose and stirring images, this is a gripping, triumphant story of science and survival. (photographs, source notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)

TITANIC Voices from the Disaster Hopkinson, Deborah Scholastic (304 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-545-11674-9

In what’s sure to be a definitive work commemorating the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, Hopkinson offers a well-researched and fascinating account of the disaster. On Monday, April 15th, 1912, the magnificent Titanic sank after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Of the 2,208 people on board, only 712 survived. It’s a well-known story, though maybe not to young readers, who, if anything, might have seen the movie. Hopkinson orchestrates a wealth of material here, using a third-person narrative voice to tell the story while incorporating eyewitness accounts of people on the “most luxurious ship the world had ever seen.” A huge number of archival photographs and reproductions of telegrams, maps, letters, illustrations, sidebars and even a dinner menu complement the text, yielding a volume as interesting for browsing as for throughreading. The voices include a stewardess, a science teacher, a 9-year-old boy, the ship’s designer, the captain and a mother on her way to a new life in America. Best of all is the author’s spirit: She encourages readers to think like historians and wonder what it would have been like on the Titanic and imagine each character’s story. Fifty pages of backmatter will inform and guide readers who want to know even more. A thorough and absorbing recreation of the ill-fated voyage. (Nonfiction. 8-16)

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“Printz Award winner Johnson…tells this moving story of grief and guilt with clarity and unsentimental honesty.” from a certain october

THE CHAOS

Hopkinson, Nalo McElderry (256 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 12, 2012 978-1-4169-5488-0 Noted for her fantasy and science fiction for adults, Hopkinson jumps triumphantly to teen literature. Scotch’s womanly build and mixed heritage (white Jamaican dad, black American mom) made her the target of small-town school bullies. Since moving to Toronto, she’s found friends and status. Now both are threatened by the mysterious sticky black spots on her skin (she hides them under her clothes, but they’re growing). When a giant bubble appears at an openmic event, Scotch dares her brother, Rich, to touch it. He disappears, a volcano rises from Lake Ontario, and chaos ripples across city and world, transforming reality in ways bizarre and hilarious, benign and malignant. A lesbian folksinger with Tamil roots becomes a purple triangle with an elephant’s trunk; jelly beans grow teeth; buried streams resurface. Scotch searches for Rich across a surreal, sensual cityscape informed by Caribbean and Russian folklore. Although what they represent and where they come from are open to interpretation, the manifestations are real to everyone and must be dealt with. Hopkinson opens her YA debut conventionally but soon finds her own path, creating a unique vocabulary with which to explore and express personal identity in its myriad forms and fluidity. Anything but essentialist, she captures her characters in the act of becoming. Rich in voice, humor and dazzling imagery, studded with edgy ideas and wildly original, this multicultural mashup— like its heroine—defies categorization. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

A CERTAIN OCTOBER Johnson, Angela Simon & Schuster (176 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-689-86505-3

Scotty’s world is turned upside down when an accident leaves her brother severely injured, an acquaintance dead and Scotty feeling responsible. In the fall of Scotty’s junior year of high school, it appears all she has to worry about is reading Anna Karenina and the homecoming dance. Scotty, who has been a vegetarian since last year’s visit to a dairy farm, describes her reality: “My life is like tofu—it’s what gets added that makes it interesting.” The most unusual thing about Scotty is her autistic, 7-yearold brother, Keone, who likes to steal cookies and run naked through the neighborhood. Her father and stepmother handle her brother without fanfare, as does Scotty, so it was normal for her to take him to the doctor and return home on the train. It is there that a tragic accident leaves Scotty injured, Keone in |

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a coma and two students dead. Suddenly, levelheaded Scotty, healing from the physical injuries, cannot let go of the guilt she feels about the loss of one student in particular. It is only when she finds a way to reconcile two of her friends and open herself to the attention of another that she takes tentative steps toward emotional peace. Printz Award winner Johnson (The First Part Last, 2004) tells this moving story of grief and guilt with clarity and unsentimental honesty. Scotty, with her rich interior life, is realistically drawn and surrounded by a cast of well-rounded secondary characters. A wonderfully crafted and deeply satisfying novel, full of detail that provides texture and meaning. (Fiction. 14 & up)

WRAPPED UP IN YOU

Jolley, Dan Illus. by Nourigat, Natalie Graphic Universe (128 pp.) $9.95 paperback | $21.95 e-book PLB $29.27 | Oct. 1, 2012 978-0-8225-9425-3 978-1-4677-0046-7 e-book 978-0-7613-6856-4 PLB Series: My Boyfriend Is a Monster, 6 When a weird midnight rite in a museum brings a hunky Incan mummy back to life, teenage Staci has a decision to make. Tall, dark, chiseled and gifted with magical powers to boot, the stranger who introduces himself as Pachacutec, or “Chuck,” puts Staci on the horns of a dilemma: Though they have instantly and thoroughly clicked, even he admits that his reanimation is dangerous and unnatural. Furthermore, Staci has a set of erstwhile friends who have been dabbling in magic, and they are so eager to drain the Incan prince of power that they’ve put a vicious hex on Staci to pressure her into betraying him. Even minor figures are distinguishable characters in Nourigat’s monotone ink-and-wash art, and both their emotional tides and the increasingly suspenseful dramatic action are ably conveyed in the small but clear panels. The climactic face-off takes place in the can’t-miss setting of an after-hours fair and leaves the would-be witches thoroughly chastened and Chuck still around for romance—plus, there’s a closing “interview” in which he reveals that he’s actually based on a historical figure. True to this series’ winning formula, an enjoyable mix of terror, comedy and romance. (Graphic paranormal romance. 12-14)

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“Sit back in a comfortable chair, bring on the Kleenex and cry your heart out.” from see you at harry ’s

FOURMILE

Key, Watt Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-374-35095-6 Key (Alabama Moon, 2006, etc.) has crafted another powerful, riveting coming-of-age tale that doesn’t stint on violence to advance the action. Middle schooler Foster and his mother have been barely getting by since his father’s death a year ago. The farm in Fourmile, Ala., is going to ruin around them without a man’s help, and now Mother has begun a relationship with dangerous, unpleasant Dax, a man she seems powerless to keep from abusing both Foster and his dog, Joe. Then Gary shows up, hiking along the rural road. He’s a young man with a secret past but is nevertheless kind, hardworking and ultimately heroic. Foster, desperate to find some steady ground in his life, connects to Gary immediately, even though in his heart he’s aware that whatever is in Gary’s past likely dooms the relationship. After Foster’s mom spurns him, Dax begins an escalating and tragic campaign of retaliation. Foster’s first-person voice is richly authentic as he gradually acquires the wisdom that will eventually lead him to a believable though heart-wrenching resolution to some of the crushing conflicts in his life. Confrontations between Dax and Gary are vivid and violent enough to disturb some readers, the violence expertly serving to define yet distinguish their characters. Deeply moving and fast-paced, this life-affirming effort is a worthy addition to the bookshelves of sturdy readers. (Fiction. 12 & up)

KEEPING THE CASTLE Kindl, Patrice Viking (272 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 14, 2012 978-0-670-01438-5

A romp of a Regency romance told through the discerning voice of a witty teenage beauty whose family needs her to marry for money. Lovely Althea Crawley, 17, lives with her kind but clueless twice-widowed mother in Crooked Castle, a drafty white elephant perched precariously on the Yorkshire coast. Althea’s 4-year-old brother, who’s heir to the castle, and her self-centered older stepsisters, Prudence and Charity, round out the household. With few funds to make ends meet, Althea, unlike so many fictional heroines who go off on unlikely adventures, accepts that she must marry for money. Prospects look up with the arrival in the neighborhood of handsome, young Lord Boring. When Althea launches her campaign, described in military terms, to secure his affections, not all goes as planned. As she pursues him, her occasional outspokenness raises a few 68

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eyebrows but also attracts admiration from an unsuspected quarter. Kindl respects the conventions of the genre while also gently mocking it. Althea observes, for example, that their ancient butler, Greengages, correctly pronounces the name of neighbor Doctor Haxhamptonshire as “Doctor Hamster.” Readers will enjoy Althea’s entertaining forays into the marriage market, secure in the belief that all will end well. While the happy ending comes as no surprise, the path to it is funny as well as satisfying, with many nods to Jane Austen along the way. (Fiction. 13 & up)

ASK THE PASSENGERS King, A.S. Little, Brown (304 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 23, 2012 978-0-316-19468-6

Big-town girl stuck in a small-town world full of lies falls for another girl. Astrid’s parents moved both her and her sister away from their New York City home years ago to a small town symbolically called Unity Valley. Since then her mom has drunk the society Kool-Aid, and her dad takes mental vacations in the garage to smoke weed. Astrid doesn’t feel like she fits in anywhere. Two friends keep her sane: her closeted BFF, Kristina, and Dee, a star hockey player she met while working for a local catering company. Sparks fly between Astrid and Dee, causing Astrid to feel even more distanced and confused. Meanwhile, Kristina and her boyfriend/beard Justin use Astrid as cover for their own same-sex sweethearts, adding more fuel to the fire. King has created an intense, fast-paced, complex and compelling novel about sexuality, politics and societal norms that will force readers outside their comfort zones. The whole town—even the alleged gay characters—buy into the Stepford-like ideal, and King elegantly uses Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to help readers understand life inside and outside of the box. Only Astrid knows what she wants. She’s in love with Dee, but she’s not sure if she’s a lesbian. She’s ignoring all of the labels and focusing on what she feels. Quite possibly the best teen novel featuring a girl questioning her sexuality written in years. (Fiction. 14 & up)

SEE YOU AT HARRY’S

Knowles, Jo Candlewick (320 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | May 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5407-8 978-0-7636-5994-3 e-book Sit back in a comfortable chair, bring on the Kleenex and cry your heart out. Seventh-grader Fern, in pitch-perfect present tense, relates the dual tragedies of her family. Her high school freshman teen

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older brother Holden has come to the place in his life where he’s acknowledged that he’s gay and is taking the first painful, unsteady steps out into a less-than-fully-accepting world. Fern offers him support and love, but what she can give is not always what he needs. Their older sister, Sara, spending a frustrating gap year after high school supposedly helping with the family restaurant, makes life hard for everyone with her critical eye and often unkind comments. And then there’s 3-year-old Charlie, always messy, often annoying, but deeply loved. Fern’s busy, distracted parents leave all of the kids wanting for more attention—until a tragic accident tears the family apart. The pain they experience after the calamity is vividly, agonizingly portrayed and never maudlin. Eventually there are tiny hints of brightness to relieve the gloom: the wisdom of Fern’s friend Ran, the ways that Sara, Fern and Holden find to support each other, and their thoughtfully depicted, ever-so-gradual healing as they rediscover the strength of family. Prescient writing, fully developed characters and completely, tragically believable situations elevate this sad, gripping tale to a must-read level. (Fiction. 11 & up)

ENCHANTED

Kontis, Alethea Harcourt (320 pp.) $16.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-547-64570-4 Readers who get past the generic title and an off-puttingly generic cover will discover a fabulous fairy-tale mashup that deserves hordes of avid readers. Sunday Woodcutter is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, living in the shadow of the memory of her eldest brother, Jack Junior, who disappeared on a cursed quest of his own. Sunday’s siblings each have their own fates and secrets. Her sisters range from twins Monday and Tuesday (Tuesday was danced to death) to Friday, who works magic with a needle; among her brothers is Trix, who is a changeling. It is Sunday, however, who becomes fast friends with a talking frog, and it is Sunday’s kiss that frees him—except she doesn’t know. Kontis has deeply and vividly woven just about every fairy-tale character readers might halfremember into the fabric of her story: the beanstalk, the warrior maiden, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and some darker ones, too. She does this so seamlessly, and with such energy and good humor, that readers might miss a few references, caught up instead in Sunday’s cheer and vivacity, or in Grumble-theFrog/Rumbold-the-Prince’s intense romantic nature (and his longing for his long-dead mother, the queen). Absolutely delectable; if it has more fripperies and furbelows than are strictly speaking necessary, it makes up for that in the wizardly grace of its storytelling. (Fantasy. 12-18)

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STORMDANCER

Kristoff, Jay Dunne/St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Sep. 18, 2012 978-1-250-00140-5 978-1-250-01791-8 e-book Series: The Lotus War, 1 Debut author Kristoff ’s steampunk adventure whisks readers to a Japanese dystopia where some mythological beings still exist, a few people have fantastical gifts, and all people live under tyranny. Yukiko, 16, has an ability the shogun’s guild would punish with death: She can commune with animals. In a unique society woven from Japanese culture and history and the author’s ingenuity of mechanical invention and disease, living standards are rough; pollution and drug addiction proliferate under the rule of a corrupt shogun who seeks to win an admittedly nebulous war. When he commissions Yukiko’s father to catch an elusive arashitora, a creature part-eagle and part-tiger, Yukiko’s quest to survive becomes more challenging. Failure to find the arashitora means the end for Yukiko and her father. Indeed, death looms around every corner in this third-person adventure, as Yukiko meets defectors, rebels and others too scared to oppose the shogun. The book takes off in earnest when Yukiko meets an arashitora. She can communicate with it, and girl and beast grow through the bond they form in surprising and thoroughly convincing ways. Ultimately the fearsome pair takes on the regime, but not before Yukiko forays into the wilds of love. Soars higher than the arashitora Kristoff writes about; superb. (Steampunk. 12 & up)

THE DISENCHANTMENTS LaCour, Nina Dutton (304 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 16, 2012 978-0-525-42219-8

Colby and Bev plan to forgo college in favor of a brief tour with Bev’s band, The Disenchantments, followed by a year traveling through Europe. But only hours into the trip, Bev makes an announcement that changes everything. Even among their alternative, artsy friends, Bev and Colby’s decision to chase their dreams is a bold move. Following in his father’s and his uncle’s musical footsteps, Colby borrows Melinda, his uncle’s beloved van, to ferry The Disenchantments from one seedy venue to the next. As they travel, the band mates are forced to face some difficult truths about each other and themselves. Each member of the band chronicles their trip in a unique way: journaling, taking photographs, drawing, even with a tattoo. Colby’s continued devotion to the self-centered and dishonest Bev is at times irritating, but it is also completely |

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h n a l o h o p k i n s on

THE CHAOS

Hopkinson, Nalo McElderry (256 pp.) $16.99 April 17, 2012 978-1-4169-5488-0

There’s a super-important dance contest in a few days, feelings for your ex-boyfriend are resurfacing, you’re at war with your former bestie, and it’s only a matter of time before your peculiar skin condition is revealed. In The Chaos, all of these are bona fide worries for 16-year-old Scotch, worries that are turned on their ear when a giant volcano rises from Lake Toronto and normalcy is swiftly replaced with chaos. A house on chicken legs, a giant tar monster, golden eyelashes, trippy psychedelics and a menagerie of the strange and unusual become commonplace as Scotch wades into the precarious waters of this volatile new landscape. Though wary to acknowledge and embrace the bizarre new world around her, Scotch eventually discovers a strength of character that might have otherwise been lost in a previous existence. Nalo Hopkinson unearths the art of ripping jeans, when to visit a doctor and how crazy can be fun. Q: Did your parents subject you to the same strict dress codes Scotch abhors? If so, what was your favorite secret ensemble? A: If you’re asking whether Scotch is a fictional version of me, the answer is, not especially. There are some similarities. Like her, I love dance. I used to take dance classes when I was her age. Like her, I love my brother to pieces. He’s six years my junior, whereas Rich is two years older than Scotch. I spent most of my teen years in the Caribbean, where I was born. Scotch was born and lives in Canada. I went to girls’ schools until I moved to Canada in my late teens. I wasn’t as self-aware, outspoken and confident as Scotch. I wasn’t as certain about my opinions, and I wasn’t interested in being one of the popular girls. I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing. Scotch is taller than me but like me, is big and curvy. She’s less troubled by that than I was. Like me, she wears her hair natural, though I didn’t always do so. She’s biracial. Both my parents are black. And they weren’t especially strict about what I wore, though my fashion choices sometimes alarmed or confused them. I remember my mother being convinced that I had deliberately torn the knees out of my favorite pair of jeans. In fact, they just wore so thin at the knees that one day I knelt down and both knees ripped out. I liked how they looked, so I didn’t mend them. I liked the clothing of the ’30s and ’50s and the funk styles of the ’70s, which were my teen years. I liked mixing and matching men’s and women’s clothing. My dad was totally bemused when I asked for his skinny ties that he was no longer wearing. I didn’t dress in clothing as revealing as Scotch’s clothes are, though I liked that clothing and still do. I didn’t have any secret outfits, and I wasn’t bullied by the girls at school, but I did get

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harassed a lot by men whenever I went out in public. There are those who would call Scotch’s clothing “provocative,” as though she’s encouraging people to act inappropriately toward her. But I’ve learned that it has nothing to do with how you’re dressed; people who want to be abusive toward others will find reasons to do so. Q: Before the Chaos, Scotch keeps her visions of the Horseless Head Men--tiny, flying, disembodied heads—to herself. Would you be able to keep hush-hush about such apparitions or immediately broadcast it to everyone you know? A: Huh. I’ve never thought about that. Seeing as I don’t live in a fantasy novel, I think I’d run straight to my doctor! Q: Name calling, reputation tarnishing, gum in hair, race issues, an unidentifiable skin disorder. Even though Scotch is exceptionally resilient, how does she put up with ordeals like these without totally losing her mind? A: Because I didn’t want her to? Because people endure that kind of stuff every day? She isn’t unaffected by it all; far from it. She’s terribly fearful of the abuse happening all over again in her new school. She worries about the skin condition all the time. Racism is everywhere. Everyone in the world experiences the effects of it, constantly. Q: Even after a volcano rises from the lake and everything radically changes, Scotch still genuinely concerns herself with an upcoming dance contest. Is this a natural human defense to more effectively deal with reality or just a complete denial of a new reality altogether? A: I think it’s that it’s taking a bit of time for her to realize just how profoundly the changes have affected her world. Q: Ben says that the Chaos is probably just a series of everyone’s “crazy” becoming visible. If the Chaos came today, what part of your “crazy” would we see wandering around? A: The fun parts, of course! I’d be able to change aspects of my physical appearance on a whim, like changing an outfit. And I change outfits a lot. Q: I’m putting you in Scotch’s place and asking you to fill out a classroom questionnaire. What’s one thing you thought would never happen to you? A: I never thought I would be getting recognition (and getting paid) for doing something I love. —Gordon West

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real. Long-held secrets strain friendships and forge new bonds. The old friends quickly realize that dreams are a combination of holding on and letting go. Quirky characters, each with his or her own story, are woven into the narrative, creating a rich tapestry that will make readers confident that they are in the hands of a master storyteller. Hauntingly beautiful. (Fiction. 14 & up)

GRAVE MERCY

LaFevers, Robin Houghton Mifflin (528 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-547-62834-9 Series: His Fair Assassin, 1 Fiction and history coalesce in a rich, ripping tale of assassinations, political intrigue and religion in 15th-century Brittany. When the pig farmer who paid three coins to wed Ismae sees the red scar across her back, he cracks her in the skull and hurls her into the root cellar until a priest can come “to burn you or drown you.” The scar shows that Ismae’s mother poisoned her in utero; Ismae’s survival of that poisoning proves her sire is Mortain, god of death. A hedge priest and herbwitch spirit Ismae to the convent of St. Mortain, where nuns teach her hundreds of ways to kill a man. “We are mere instruments of Mortain….His handmaidens, if you will. We do not decide who to kill or why or when. It is all determined by the god.” After Ismae’s first two assassinations, the abbess sends her to Brittany’s high court to ferret out treason against the duchess and to kill anyone Mortain marks, even if it’s someone Ismae trusts—or loves. Brittany fights to remain independent from France, war looms and suitors vie nefariously for the duchess’ hand. Ismae’s narrative voice is fluid and solid, her spying and killing skills impeccable. LaFevers’ ambitious tapestry includes poison and treason and murder, valor and honor and slow love, suspense and sexuality and mercy. A page turner—with grace. (map, list of characters) (Historical thriller. 14 & up)

IN DARKNESS

Lake, Nick Bloomsbury (352 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 17, 2012 978-1-59990-743-7 A tale of two Haitis—one modern, one historic—deftly intertwine in a novel for teens and adults. Readers first meet Shorty under the rubble of the recent earthquake, as he struggles to make sense of his past, present and future. Through flashbacks, they learn of his gangster life in a dangerous Port-au-Prince slum, where he searches for |

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his twin sister, Marguerite, after they’ve been separated by gang violence. In his stressed state, Shorty communes with the spirit of Toussaint l’Ouverture, leader of the slave uprising that ultimately transformed Haiti into the world’s first black republic. Lake adeptly alternates chapters between “Now” (post-earthquake) and “Then” (circa turn-of-the-19th century). His minimalist, poetic style reveals respect for vodou culture, as well as startling truths: “In darkness, I count my blessings like Manman taught me. One: I am alive. Two: there is no two.” While the images of slavery and slum brutality are not for the fainthearted, and Shorty’s view of humanitarian workers may stir debate, readers will be inspired to learn more about Haiti’s complex history. Timed for the second anniversary of the Haitian earthquake, this double-helix-of-a-story explores the nature of freedom, humanity, survival and hope. A dark journey well worth taking—engrossing, disturbing, illuminating. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14 & up)

THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND

Lanagan, Margo Knopf (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-375-86919-8 978-0-375-98930-8 e-book 978-0-375-96919-5 PLB In this spellbinding, intricately layered novel, the Printz Honor winner (Tender Morsels, 2008) puts her unique spin on selkies—haunting, mysterious, seal-human shape-shifters in a world of hardscrabble fishing villages, lonely islands and cold, restless seas. At the story’s heart is unattractive, abused Misskaella, whose harsh life on Rollrock Island changes when, at age 9, she awakens to powers that include an exhilarating, terrifying connection to the island’s seals. Left largely unguided to develop her gifts, Misskaella grows up unloved, unmarried and feared. A secret joy makes life bearable, but loss soon follows. When she learns to draw forth a beautiful woman from a seal, life changes again. Island men set aside their human wives—girls and matrons who once ridiculed Misskaella—and pay whatever she asks for seal wives. Beautiful, strange, sad, they’re truly loved by the husbands and sons who refuse to see their unhappiness. Earthy, vigorous characters and prose ground the narrative in the world we know, yet its themes are deep as the sea. Daniel, son of a human father and his seal wife, wonders why “whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.” Intentions and actions, cause and effect are untidy and complicated, raising questions that will require generations to answer. Bracing, powerful, resonant. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

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“The tragedy of discarded children is skillfully explored in this stunning novel in verse.” from my book of life by angel

TEAM HUMAN

Larbalestier, Justine; Rees Brennan, Sarah HarperTeen (352 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-06-208964-9 Both lovers and loathers of teen vampire romance will revel in this hilarious satirical take on the genre. Mel might not exactly have her own life sorted out, but she’s always been there for her BFFs, Cathy and Anna. She indulges Cathy’s passion for history, ruins and old things in general; that is, until Francis Duvarney enrolls in their high school. Vampires may be both dead and deadly, but they are also a legally tolerated minority and even tourist attractions—and Francis, with his mesmerizing good looks and stuffy arrogance, is irresistible to an old-fashioned girl like Cathy. Meanwhile, Anna sees Francis as an unbearable reminder of the collapse of her parents’ marriage. Mel knows her duty to both of them: prove that Francis is up to no good, whether the clues lead her into the city’s terrifying vampire district, the school’s rat-infested basement, or even the arms of a cute guy. While primarily an affectionate parody of the genre, filled with clever allusions and devastating snark, the story also sympathetically illuminates the allure of vampire romance, for characters and readers alike. In an unexpectedly poignant turn, it becomes a celebration of love in all its forms: crushes and spouses, parents and children, brothers and sisters, families born and created, and above all, friends tested and true. Laugh-out-loud funny, heart-wrenchingly sad and fistpump-in-the-air triumphant, this sparkling gem proves that vampires, zombies and even teenagers…at heart, we’re all on Team Human. (Fantasy. 12 & up.)

MY BOOK OF LIFE BY ANGEL

Leavitt, Martine Margaret Ferguson/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (256 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-374-35123-6 The tragedy of discarded children is skillfully explored in this stunning novel in verse. Angel, 16, pretends she lives at the mall, helping herself to shoes on display. She falls prey to a pimp named Call, who watches her shoplift, buys her meals and gives her “candy” (crack). Knowing that “it’s the ones from good homes / who follow orders best,” Call persuades Angel to do him a favor with chilling ease. Turning tricks on a street corner in Vancouver, she meets Serena, who teaches her to fend for herself with “dates” and encourages her to write her life. When Serena goes missing, Angel vows to clean up her act. Dope sick, she slowly wakes up to Call’s evil, weathering the torments of her 72

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captive life with courage. The deliberate use of spacing emphasizes the grim choice confronting Angel when Call brings home a new girl, 11-year-old Melli. Leavitt’s mastery of form builds on the subtle interplay between plot and theme. “John the john” is a divorced professor who makes Angel read Book 9 from Milton’s Paradise Lost, inadvertently teaching her the power that words, expression and creativity have to effect change. Passages from Milton frame the chapters, as Angel, in her own writing, grasps her future. Based on the factual disappearance of dozens of Vancouver women, this novel of innocence compromised is bleak, but not without hope or humor. An astonishing, wrenching achievement. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14 & up)

EVERY DAY

Levithan, David Knopf (304 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-307-93188-7 Imagine waking up in a different body every day. A is a 16-year-old genderless being who drifts from body to body each day, living the life of a new human host of the same age and similar geographic radius for 24 hours. One morning, A wakes up a girl with a splitting hangover; another day he/she wakes up as a teenage boy so overweight he can barely fit into his car. Straight boys, gay girls, teens of different races, body shapes, sizes and genders make up the catalog of A’s outward appearances, but ultimately A’s spirit—or soul—remains the same. One downside of A’s life is that he/she doesn’t have a family, nor is he/she able to make friends. A tries to interfere as little as possible with the lives of the teenagers until the day he/she meets and falls head over heels in love with Rhiannon, an ethereal girl with a jackass boyfriend. A pursues Rhiannon each day in whatever form he/she wakes up in, and Rhiannon learns to recognize A—not by appearance, but by the way he/she looks at her across the room. The two have much to overcome, and A’s shifting physical appearance is only the beginning. Levithan’s self-conscious, analytical style marries perfectly with the plot. His musings on love, longing and human nature knit seamlessly with A’s journey. Readers will devour his trademark poetic wordplay and cadences that feel as fresh as they were when he wrote Boy Meets Boy (2003). An awe-inspiring, thought-provoking reminder that love reaches beyond physical appearances or gender. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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THRONE OF GLASS Maas, Sarah J. Bloomsbury (384 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-59990-695-9

A teenage assassin, a rebel princess, menacing gargoyles, supernatural portals and a glass castle prove to be as thrilling as they sound. Being the most feared assassin in Adarlan is a notoriety 17-year-old Celaena considers an honor, even though it has landed her in a slave-labor prison no one has ever survived. A year into her sentence, the Crown Prince offers to sponsor Celaena in a competition with 23 other criminals and murderers that, should she win, will result in her freedom. The only catch? She’ll become the king’s personal assassin for four years, the same dark-hearted king who sentenced her to imprisonment. Woven in the vein of a Tolkien fantasy, Celaena’s world is one where magic is outlawed and power is snatched through greed and genocide. The third-person narrative allows frequent insight into multiple characters (heroes and villains alike) but never fully shifts its focus from the confident yet conflicted Celaena. And though violent combat and whispers of the occult surround her, Celaena is still just a teenager trying to forge her way, giving the story timelessness. She might be in the throes of a bloodthirsty competition, but that doesn’t mean she’s not in turmoil over which tall, dark and handsomely titled man of the royal court should be her boyfriend—and which fancy gown she should wear to a costume party. This commingling of comedy, brutality and fantasy evokes a rich alternate universe with a spitfire young woman as its brightest star. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

FIRE IN THE STREETS Magoon, Kekla Aladdin (336 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-2230-8

The Black Panthers seem to have the answers for Maxie and her friends, so when a traitor to the group is suspected, she is determined to find who is leaking information to the Chicago police. Maxie and her brother Raheem are deeply involved with the Black Panther Party. The shooting of a close friend and ongoing conflicts with the Chicago police make the radical group seem like the only protection they can count on. Problems at home—their mother’s unemployment, drinking and various boyfriends—make the Panther office a refuge for Maxie, and she presses to become a real member: armed, trained and patrolling the streets like her brother. She is deemed too young, so when Maxie hears there may be a traitor in the Panthers, she decides to discover who it is and prove she is ready to take a real place in the organization. The discovery |

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changes everything and forces Maxie to face almost unbearable truths. In this companion to award-winning A Rock and the River (2009), Magoon explores the role the Black Panthers played in urban communities during the tumultuous times of the late ’60s. Maxie is a believable and feisty character. Her interactions with her brother and his efforts to be the parent their mother seems incapable of being both ring true, as does her relationship with Sam, still grieving the death of his brother. Historical moments such as the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention strengthen the sense of time and place, but this is primarily an authentic story of a young person attempting to grasp where she will stand in the struggle. A well-written, compelling trip to a past not often portrayed in children’s literature. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

FROI OF THE EXILES

Marchetta, Melina Candlewick (608 pp.) $18.99 | $18.99 e-book | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-7636-4759-9 978-0-7636-5966-0 e-book Series: The Lumatere Chronicles, 2 With this, the second of the Lumatere Chronicles, fans will be delighted to learn more about this fantasy world and their favorite characters from Finnikin of

the Rock (2010). Set three years after Lumatere was freed from the Charynite occupation, the story revolves around Queen Isaboe’s decision to send Froi to assassinate the infamous king of Charyn. Froi, petty thief and former slave from the land of Sarnak, has developed (beyond all expectations) into a skilled fighter, farmer and pupil of history and language. The quickstart plot grabs attention right off, and the steady buildup of tension—fueled by abductions, political machinations, regicide and political chaos—will keep people reading through this long book. Characters, always Marchetta’s strength, grow and develop as the story progresses, while the land of Charyn, portrayed with telling details, cleverly supports the tale’s suspense. An epilogue reveals that there’s much more to come. For fans, this is a must-read; newcomers to Lumatere’s story will dive in with enthusiasm. This epic has everything readers can ask for: great characters and a truly spectacular plot filled with romance, suspense, friendship and betrayal. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

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SHADOWFELL

Marillier, Juliet Knopf (416 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $19.99 Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-375-86954-9 978-0-375-98366-5 e-book 978-0-375-96954-6 PLB In an alternate ancient British Isles, an intrepid heroine may save the kingdom from its wicked ruler. Marillier’s deep knowledge of folklore and the early-medieval period shine through, but never overwhelm, her latest. In Alban, the Good Folk (widely varied, magical creatures) have occasionally intermingled with humans, and as a result, some humans are “canny.” Canny Neryn can see the Good Folk, which may only be the beginning. But tyrannical King Keldec has turned Alban into a realm of fear and hatred where canny folk are killed or used as weapons. Neryn and her father have fled the king’s Enforcers for years, haunted by their village’s massacre. When a mysterious stranger saves Neryn from her father’s drunken gambling and an Enforcer raid, Neryn finds herself journeying toward Shadowfell, the secret rebel enclave she hopes exists. Neryn’s struggles—to exist day to day, to make peace with the tragedies of her past and the uncertainties of her present, and, above all, to grasp and even use her own terrible power—ground this tale. The slightest thread of a blossoming relationship winds throughout, while magic imbues everything but feels real; the Good Folk are other, but not, in this carefully detailed world, fantastic. Proper fantasy, balanced between epic and personal; this promises to be an engrossing series, with intimations of bigger things ahead. (Historical fantasy. 13 & up)

BE MY ENEMY

McDonald, Ian Pyr/Prometheus Books (280 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-61614-678-8 Series: Everness, 2 In this exciting first sequel to outstanding series opener Planesrunner (2011), 14-year-old science whiz Everett Singh continues to outthink his enemies while navigating the multiverse searching for his dad, lost in a parallel universe. Everett’s enemies multiply in this installment. There’s still the marvelously imagined villain Charlotte Villiers, with her impeccable 1940s style and the confidence of genius, but now Everett’s “alter,” Everett M, his double from another paralleluniverse Earth, has been made into a cyborg instructed to eliminate Everett. Add to those a new threat: sentient advanced technology gone bad. The quirky crewmates on their rogue airship, especially Sen, the wonderfully original Airish girl with her 74

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

enjoyably distinctive dialect, keep the conversations lively as they dodge death at every turn. McDonald roots Everett’s heroism in his intelligence. Everett knows mathematics, physics and Punjabi cooking. He wins because he outthinks his rivals, not because he’s faster or stronger, like his alter. Stuffed with science, this series has the potential to fascinate young readers as William Sleator’s books did, tackling concepts on the slippery edge of current understanding. Science causes danger, but it’s also the weapon that combats those terrors. Smart, clever and abundantly original, with suspense that grabs your eyeballs, this is real science fiction for all ages. More! More! (Science fiction. 12 & up)

THE BROKEN LANDS Milford, Kate Clarion (464 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-547-73966-3

Two teens race against time to thwart the forces of evil in this prequel to The Boneshaker (2010). The Broken Land is a hotel where much crucial action takes place, but it is also an apt description of the United States in 1877. The Civil War has scarred the country, and Reconstruction has ended. “Folks are angry, still,” orphan Sam is told. “Folks are scared and folks feel like punishing each other, and I don’t think many of ’em are clear about what they’re mad for.” It is also a time of technological marvels like the Brooklyn Bridge, although this particular wonder has come with a price for young Sam. After losing his father to illness brought on by work on the bridge, Sam finds himself working as a cardsharp in Coney Island. He becomes the unlikely ally of Jin, a Chinese girl working with a team to provide fireworks at Broken Land, as they find themselves resisting a figure seeking to establish his own Hell. This seamless blend of fantasy and historical fiction is ripe with rich, gritty detail. Best of all, it is populated by a vast array of unusual characters: Along with Sam and Jin, there’s Tom, a former member of the U.S. Colored Troops, and Susannah, a biracial woman who may hold the key to victory. Readers will be captivated. (Steampunk. 12 & up)

A BREATH OF EYRE

Mont, Eve Marie Kensington (352 pp.) $9.95 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7582-6948-5 This richly satisfying tale of first and last love transcends its genre—not another breathless, fan-fiction take on a literary classic but an intertextual love letter. Raised by a distant father and ex-debutante stepmother, shy, bookish Emma teen

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“The broad focus of the slim volume allows it to be about many things: medical discovery, technology, art and how people from all walks of life have dealt with a deadly disease that pays no attention to social distinctions.” from invincible microbe

misses the mother she barely remembers. At Emma’s 16th birthday party, her mother’s college roommate, Simona, gives her a copy of Jane Eyre. Emma finds Simona’s son, Gray, disturbingly attractive, but he dates an A-list girl at Lockwood, the boarding school Emma, a scholarship student, attends. The alliance she forges with her new roommate—fellow scholarship student and Haitian science whiz Michelle—heartens both until, struck by lightning, Emma wakes up to find herself Jane Eyre. Though her world is comforting at first, Mr. Rochester’s controlling ways trouble Emma, who feels deepening compassion for Bertha Mason. (Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is clearly a referent here.) She fights her way home, but unresolved issues and mysteries, especially the connection between Jane’s world and Emma’s mother, draw her back. With evocative settings and compassionately drawn characters, this trilogy opener offers affectionate insight into the gifts literature gives readers. If treasured books have the power to change us, it’s a two-way street. As we change, so does our relationship to those books and so, in a sense, we change them. A smart and rewarding ode to literature. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

INVINCIBLE MICROBE Tuberculosis and the Never-Ending Search for a Cure Murphy, Jim; Blank, Alison Clarion (160 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-0-618-53574-3

Murphy and Blank chronicle the story of the tuberculosis microorganism, the greatest serial killer of all time. Tuberculosis has been infecting people for millions of years and has killed over a trillion humans. This fascinating tale unfolds as a biography of a germ, an account of the treatment and search for cures, and a social history of the disease. As Murphy treated yellow fever in An American Plague (2003), this volume offers a lively text complemented by excellent, well-placed reproductions of photographs, drawings, flyers, woodcuts, posters and ads. The images include an Edvard Munch painting depicting the death of his 16-year-old sister of tuberculosis, a flyer for a Paul Laurence Dunbar poetry reading with a discussion of how minorities were denied proper medical care, a drawing showing death coming for Irish-born author Laurence Sterne and a photograph of Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, all of whom died of tuberculosis. The broad focus of the slim volume allows it to be about many things: medical discovery, technology, art and how people from all walks of life have dealt with a deadly disease that pays no attention to social distinctions. The bibliography is thorough, and even the source notes are illuminating. Who knew the biography of a germ could be so fascinating? (acknowledgments, picture credits, index [not seen]) (Nonfiction. 9-14)

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NO CRYSTAL STAIR A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller

Nelson, Vaunda Micheaux Illus. by Christie, R. Gregory Carolrhoda Lab (192 pp.) $17.95 | $12.95 e-book | Feb. 1, 2012 978-0-7613-6169-5 978-0-7613-8727-5 e-book Lewis Michaux provided a venue for his fellow AfricanAmericans to have access to their own history and philosophy at a time when the very idea was revolutionary. Michaux’s family despaired of him, as he engaged in petty crime and was obviously headed in the wrong direction. He began to read, however, and discovered a connection to the writings of Marcus Garvey and others, and he determined that knowledge of black thinkers and writers was the way to freedom and dignity. With an inventory of five books, he started his National Memorial African Bookstore as “the home of proper propaganda” and built it into a Harlem landmark, where he encouraged his neighbors to read, discuss and learn, whether or not they could afford to buy. His clients included Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni. Nelson, Michaux’s great-niece, makes use of an exhaustive collection of interviews, articles, books, transcripts and FBI files, filling in the gaps with “informed speculation.” Brief entries arranged in mostly chronological order read seamlessly so that fact and fiction meld in a cohesive whole. Michaux’s voice blends with those of the people in his life, providing a full portrait of a remarkable man. Copious illustrations in the form of photographs, copies of appropriate ephemera and Christie’s powerfully emotional free-form line drawings add depth and focus. A stirring and thought-provoking account of an unsung figure in 20th-century American history. (author’s notes, source notes, bibliography, index) (Fictional biography. 12-18)

A CONFUSION OF PRINCES

Nix, Garth Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $17.99 | PLB $18.89 | May 15, 2012 978-0-06-009694-6 978-0-06-009695-3 PLB Exuberant and insightful, this science-fiction bildungsroman grapples with the essential question: “Who am I?” After 16 years of intensive training and superhuman augmentation, Khemri is ready to take his place as Prince of the mighty intergalactic Empire. Alas, he immediately finds out that his status isn’t quite as exalted as he had always thought. To start with, there are tens of millions of Princes, and most of them are out to kill him. Khem must |

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“The author is a master at portraying the complex, emotional inner lives of these teens, and their contemporary adolescent voices and perceptions (and misperceptions) ring true.” from two or three things i forgot to tell you

negotiate a deadly maze of military training, priestly recruitment and even Imperial interest, never knowing whom he can trust. He can rely only on himself—and all the mechanical, biological and psionic enhancements that far-future science can provide, until the day even that is stripped from him…From the riveting opening sentence to the final elegiac ruminations, this is rip-roaring space opera in the classic mold. Add a perfect protagonist: Overprivileged, arrogant and not nearly as clever as he thinks, Khemri’s first-person narration is also endearingly witty, rueful and infinitely likable. Perhaps his account relies a bit too much on “had I but known” foreshadowing, and the secondary characters are thinly sketched accessories to the hero’s personal journey. But the rocket-powered pace and epic worldbuilding (with just the right amount of gee-whiz technobabble) provide an ideal vehicle for what is, at heart, a sweet paean to what it means to be human. Space battles! Political intrigue! Engineered warriors! Techno-wizardry! Assassins! Pirates! Rebels! Duels! Secrets, lies, sex and True Love! What more can anybody ask for? (Science fiction. 14 & up)

TWO OR THREE THINGS I FORGOT TO TELL YOU

Oates, Joyce Carol HarperTeen (288 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-06-211047-3 978-0-06-211049-7 e-book At the heart of Oates’ riveting and poignant story of three teenage girls in crisis is the notion that a “secret can be too toxic to expose to a friend.” In part 1, it’s mid-December of their senior year at Quaker Heights Day School, a prep school in an affluent New Jersey suburb. Merissa, “The Perfect One,” has just been accepted early admission at Brown, with more good news to come. When she desperately needs a release—from the pressures to succeed, hypocrisy and her parents’ disintegrating marriage—she secretly embraces cutting. Part 2 flashes back to 15 months earlier, when smart, funny, edgy, unpredictable Tink, a former child star, transfers into their junior class and changes everything. Part 3 picks back up in the winter of their senior year and focuses on Nadia, who falls prey to sexts and cyberbullying. Tink’s suicide is revealed early on, and yet she remains a believable and critical touchstone for Merissa and Nadia, part of the girls of Tink Inc. The author is a master at portraying the complex, emotional inner lives of these teens, and their contemporary adolescent voices and perceptions (and misperceptions) ring true. The psychological dramas, though numerous, are deftly handled. What appears at first to be a bleak worldview does in fact make room for healing, change and standing up for what’s right. Intense, keenly insightful, nuanced and affecting. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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PANDEMONIUM

Oliver, Lauren Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-06-197806-7 It’s been six months since readers first met 17-year-old Lena Haloway, desperately in love in a world that considers such feelings an infection to be permanently and irrevocably “cured.” This much-anticipated sequel to Delirium (2011) picks up right where the first novel left off, with Lena and Alex’s only partially successful attempt to escape to “the Wilds.” Lena, alone, heartbroken and near death, must reach deep within herself to find the strength and the will to survive. “Step by step—and then, inch by inch,” she is reborn. The story of Lena’s new life as a rebel Invalid, determined to honor the memory of Alex by fighting for a world in which love is no longer considered a capital offense, is told through a series of flashbacks and present-day accounts that will leave readers breathless. The stakes only get higher when Lena realizes she has feelings for someone new. The novel’s success can be attributed to its near–pitch-perfect combination of action and suspense, coupled with the subtler but equally gripping evolution of Lena’s character. From the grief-stricken shell of her former self to a nascent refugee and finally to a full-fledged resistance fighter, Lena’s strength and the complexity of her internal struggles will keep readers up at night. (Dystopian romance. 14 & up)

SUCH WICKED INTENT

Oppel, Kenneth Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-1-4424-0318-5 Series: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, 2 He failed to save his twin brother through alchemy, but young Victor Frankenstein eagerly delves back into the sinister sciences in this sequel to 2011’s This

Dark Endeavor. Three weeks after Konrad’s death, Victor plucks a mysterious box from the still-warm ashes of the books of the Dark Library. Demonstrating tremendous hubris, Victor aims to return Konrad to the living world and still win Elizabeth, Konrad’s grief-stricken love and the boys’ childhood friend. When Victor uncovers a way into the spirit world, he finds that Konrad is in neither heaven nor hell but in an alternate version of the house, where eons collide, a ravenous mist lurks outside, and groans arise from below. Elizabeth and Henry Clerval soon join Victor on his journeys to the other realm and on his mission to build a body for Konrad, based on ancient drawings and teen

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monstrous bones discovered in caves beneath the castle. As in the first book, the trio realizes the high cost of their quest too late. Victor is a fascinating if sometimes unlikable character, ambitious, brooding, reckless and obsessive in his pursuit of knowledge and power; Printz honor winner Oppel skillfully portrays him as both a troubled teen and the boy who would become Frankenstein. Addictions and lustful encounters add another layer of sophistication to the gothic melodrama. A standout sequel and engrossing ghost story. (Horror. 14 & up)

BURN MARK

Powell, Laura Bloomsbury (416 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 19, 2012 978-1-59990-843-4 Crime noir meets paranormal romance in this addictive thriller about two London teens in whom the fae awakens, conferring abilities at once exhilarating and harshly stigmatized. Glory exults in her strong powers, although Auntie Angel warns her to hide them from the organized-crime covens ruling their hardscrabble neighborhood; otherwise, she could be forced to marry Wednesday Coven–heir Troy Morgan. (Powerful witches are rare, and the gift runs in families.) To Lucas, whose ancestry includes England’s most distinguished inquisitors, his awakening fae feels like a door slamming on his future and his father’s career as Chief Prosecutor of the Inquisitorial Court. Asked to investigate who’s sabotaging an important legal case, Lucas jumps at the chance, working with a skeptical Glory. In this alternative contemporary England, witches have achieved some rights and can even have careers, provided they’re “bridled” (fitted with magic-preventing iron). Still, stake burning remains legal, though regulated; growing popular movements advocate witch genocide. Political intrigue and class warfare, inquisitorial office and coven politics are densely detailed without overwhelming the characters or slowing the pace as the narrative builds to a tense climax so cinematic that readers will find themselves mentally casting the film version. This smart, stylish series opener raises the bar for paranormal fiction, leaving readers impatient for the next installment. (author’s note) (Urban fantasy. 12 & up)

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DODGER

Pratchett, Terry Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | PLB $18.89 Sep. 25, 2012 978-0-06-200949-4 978-0-06-219015-4 e-book 978-0-06-200950-0 PLB Pratchett leaves Discworld to bring us something that is quite nearly—but not exactly—actual historical fiction. Dodger is a guttersnipe and a tosher (a glossary would not have been amiss to help readers navigate the many archaic terms, although most are defined in the text, often humorously). He knows everyone, and everyone knows him, and he’s a petty criminal but also (generally) one of the good guys. One night he rescues a beautiful young woman and finds himself hobnobbing quite literally with the likes of Charlie Dickens (yes, that Dickens) and Ben Disraeli. The young woman is fleeing from an abusive husband and has been beaten until she miscarried; power and abuse are explored sensitively but deliberately throughout. And when he attempts to smarten himself up to impress the damsel in distress, he unexpectedly comes face to face with— and disarms!—Sweeney Todd. As Dodger rises, he continuously grapples with something Charlie has said: “the truth is a fog.” Happily, the only fog here is that of Dodger’s London, and the truth is quite clear: Historical fiction in the hands of the inimitable Sir Terry brings the sights and the smells (most certainly the smells) of Old London wonderfully to life, in no small part due to the masterful third-person narration that adopts Dodger’s voice with utmost conviction. Unexpected, drily funny and full of the pathos and wonder of life: Don’t miss it. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)

BOY21

Quick, Matthew Little, Brown (256 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2012 978-0-316-12797-4 In a town partially controlled by the Irish mob, a quiet friendship develops between two basketball players. Finley doesn’t say much, and his basketball teammates fondly call him White Rabbit, both for his quiet demeanor and for being the only white player on his high school team. He is surprised but willing when his coach introduces him to Russ Washington and asks Finley to look after him. Russ, a nationally recognized athlete, is experiencing post-traumatic stress after the murder of his parents. While there are hints that something in Finley’s own past makes this assignment particularly relevant, Finley quietly but firmly refuses to discuss his own history with other characters or with readers. Instead, they see the friendship among the two boys and Finley’s girlfriend, Erin, gently unfold |

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

and the mysteries surrounding Russ deepen. Does Russ want to play basketball or not? Does he really believe he is an alien called Boy21? The answers here are satisfying but never simple, and the setting, a working-class town where asking too many questions can have deadly consequences, is a bleak, haunting foil to the boys’ comfortable silence. Family relationships are well-drawn, and foreshadowing is effective without being predictable. A story that, like Finley, expresses a lot in relatively few words. (Fiction. 12 & up)

THE CHILDREN AND THE WOLVES Rapp, Adam Candlewick (160 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5337-8

Two wayward teens fall under the evil thrall of a third in this disturbing tale by the Printz Honor–winning author of Punkzilla (2009). Fourteen-year-old amoral honors student Bounce convinces two socially challenged and drug-addicted seventh-graders, Wiggins and Orange, to kidnap a 3-year-old girl and imprison her in Orange’s basement. Then the three manufacture posters of the girl they have dubbed the Frog and use them to collect “donations” for the missing child. In reality, Bounce is saving up to buy a gun, which she intends to use on a local author who offended her during a class visit. Orange is all in, but sensitive Wiggins, who imagines his soul as “a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest,” begins to question the plan, especially when Bounce hints that the Frog’s time is running out. Though the slim novel’s premise is profoundly unsettling, Rapp’s poetic use of language makes for a brutally beautiful read. There is a drug dealer with “a face like a rubber shark” and buildings that “look perfect, like they got baked in a oven with some brownies.” The author continues to push the boundaries of fiction for teens by providing an unrelentingly real and intensely powerful voice for the disenfranchised youth who dangle on society’s edge, forgotten until they commit random acts of violence because they have been shown no other way. Hard to read, impossible to forget. (Fiction. 14 & up)

BEYOND COURAGE The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Rappaport, Doreen Candlewick (240 pp.) $22.99 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-2976-2

In a book that is the very model of excellence in nonfiction, Rappaport dispels the old canard that the Jews entered the houses of death as lambs led to the slaughter. 78

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

Although “[t]he scope and extent of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust cannot possibly be contained in one book,” Rappaport offers an astonishing and inspiring survey. By shining a spotlight on individuals and their involvement in given situations—Kristallnacht, deportations, guerrilla resistance, among others—throughout Europe, she creates intimate personal snapshots of the years of the Nazi occupation. She tells of people who committed acts of destruction as well as those whose resistance was in the simple act of celebrating and maintaining their faith in impossible conditions. Well-known events—the escape from Sobibor, the battle for Warsaw—share space with less-familiar ones. Short biographies introduce readers to those involved, some of whom the author has interviewed. Archival images help readers envision the people and places that are mentioned: partisan forest hideaways, concentration camps, the ovens, barracks, groups of people on their way to death, diagrams of camps and more. Thorough, deeply researched and stylistically clear, this is a necessary, exemplary book. (pronunciation guide, chronology, notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)

THE BRONTË SISTERS The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Reef, Catherine Clarion (240 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 23, 2012 978-0-547-57966-5

The wild freedom of the imagination and the heart, and the tragedy of lives ended just as success is within view— such a powerful story is that of the Brontë children. Reef’s gracefully plotted, carefully researched account focuses on Charlotte, whose correspondence with friends, longer life and more extensive experience outside the narrow milieu of Haworth, including her acquaintance with the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who became her biographer, revealed more of her personality. She describes the Brontë children’s early losses of their mother and then their two oldest siblings, conveying the imaginative, verbally rich life of children who are essentially orphaned but share both the wild countryside and the gifts of story. Brother Branwell’s tragic struggle with alcohol and opium is seen as if offstage, wounding to his sisters and his father but sad principally because he never found a way to use literature to save himself. Reef looks at the 19thcentury context for women writers and the reasons that the sisters chose to publish only under pseudonyms—and includes a wonderful description of the encounter in which Anne and Charlotte revealed their identities to Charlotte’s publisher. She also includes brief, no-major-spoilers summaries of the sisters’ novels, inviting readers to connect the dots and to understand how real-life experience was transformed into fiction. A solid and captivating look at these remarkable pioneers of modern fiction. (notes and a comprehensive bibliography) (Biography. 12-16) teen

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“Infused with an urgent hope, this glimmering love story exhilarates and refreshes.” from the girl with borrowed wings

THIS IS NOT FORGIVENESS

Rees, Celia Bloomsbury (288 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 16, 2012 978-1-59990-776-5 A dark and dangerous thrill ride pushes teen readers to the brink of their comfort zones when it comes to issues of love, lust, politics, family and war. Despite repeated warnings, Jamie can’t resist the sexy and mysterious Caro. He would do anything for her, and she knows it. What he doesn’t know is that Caro and his older brother Rob have a secret past. Rees revels in an unapologetic exploration of extremes in this smart and well-crafted novel. The brothers are perfect foils for each other, with Jamie an eager-to-please, typical teen, and Rob a menacing and tragic war veteran prone to terrifyingly violent outbursts. Though Caro’s manipulations of the brothers for her own political gain drive the action of the story, the relationship between the two siblings provides its molten emotional core. As Rob becomes increasingly unhinged, Jamie’s desperation to claim Caro as his own and to assert himself in his relationship with his brother becomes a matter of life and death. Though the portrayal of Rob’s deteriorating mental state is raw and often uncomfortable, in the end, the honest, uncensored storytelling makes this a tale that will stay with readers long after the final page is turned. (Fiction. 14 & up)

A MILLION SUNS

Revis, Beth Razorbill/Penguin (400 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 10, 2012 978-1-59514-398-3 Series: Across the Universe, 2 Opening soon after the bleak ending of Across the Universe (2011), this captivating middle volume takes Godspeed’s 2,763 residents through commotion, twists and game-changers. Sixteen-year-old Elder (he refuses the title Eldest, despite being the ship’s leader now) learned in the trilogy opener that Godspeed’s weakened engine offers no chance of planet-landing for many decades. But Elder’s been studying physics, and he’s newly skeptical. Confronting the Shippers who physically run Godspeed begins a string of surprising reveals and so does a set of clues left by a cryogenically frozen rebel. Among this population that’s been shipborn for generations, Earthborn Amy sticks out like a sore thumb (in race-coded ways that are troubling when examined closely). Amy wants off the 10 square miles of this metal-walled spaceship. The environment (levels; elevators; fields under a solar lamp; crammed stacks of city buildings) gives the plot (food hoarding, rape, riots, revolution) an acute tension. |

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Amy and Elder alternate narrating in first person. Their voices aren’t distinct, their actions and characterizations frustrating in many ways, but it hardly matters: Revis’ shining brilliance is the fierce tension about survival (is Godspeed deteriorating? can people survive terrorism inside an enclosed spaceship?) and the desperate core question of whether any generation will ever reach a planet. Setting and plot are the heart and soul of this ripping space thriller, and they’re unforgettable. (Science fiction. 14 & up)

THE GIRL WITH BORROWED WINGS Rossetti, Rinsai Dial (300 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 19, 2012 978-0-8037-3566-8

Her name—Frenenqer—means “restraint” in “some language or other,” and she is the only child—creation, really—of a man for whom affection is unspeakable: Pfft. Expatriates, Frenenqer and her parents have lived many places but called none of them home. The teen’s world now is comprised of three boxes: her family’s apartment, her school and the car that takes her from one to the other within the dusty, isolated oasis. When, much to her father’s displeasure, Frenenqer rescues a large cat she finds caged in the souk, she liberates a “Free person,” a shape-shifting being “born without rules.” His are the wings she “borrows” when he nightly takes her in his arms and flies her around the world and into the realms of the Free people. With Sangris, Frenenqer feels free for the first time in her life—but can freedom accommodate love? Rossetti’s lush language is highly metaphorical and often sensuous, befitting the unfurling of Frenenqer’s stunted soul: “And when I came back up the air was still fresh and calm-smelling,…and the palm trees rustled in faint applause.” Her earthy, often funny exchanges with Sangris represent freedom for both Frenenqer and readers from her cold, controlling father, whose “words have a way of shaping the world around him.” Infused with an urgent hope, this glimmering love story exhilarates and refreshes. (Magical realism. 12 & up)

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

“Meticulous pacing and finely nuanced characters underpin the author’s gift for affecting prose that illuminates the struggles within relationships.” from aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe

SONS OF THE 613 Rubens, Michael Clarion (320 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-547-61216-4

This is a book every bar-mitzvah boy will want to steal. “What’s the first thing you say up there onstage during your bar mitzvah?” asks Josh. Josh is holding his brother Isaac over his head. Josh is taking a break from his wrestling scholarship at NYU and taking care of Isaac while their parents are in Italy. Isaac is supposed to say, “Today, I am a man.” They both think that’s pretty stupid. “Are you a man?” Josh asks. Isaac: “Um...no?” Josh: “No, you’re not. You’re still a boy.” This may be the least interesting statement in the book, because every bar-mitzvah boy already knows it. But no parent will ever give this book as a bar-mitzvah gift because of the bar fights, the strippers and the vomit. Josh has decided to turn his brother into a man, and he’s decided to do it in the three weeks before Isaac turns 13. Isaac will meet Josh’s friends: strippers, an African-American pool player in a porkpie hat and Patrick the Meth-Dealing Punk. Parents will expect a bar-mitzvah book to inspire their child, teach him something and make him proud to be Jewish. Surprisingly, this novel accomplishes two out of three. This book won’t make readers proud to be Jewish. It will make them proud to be a pool player in a porkpie hat, a tattooed punk or anyone who survives all the way to 13. Everyone should read it the moment he becomes a man. (Fiction. 13-17)

AFTER ELI

Rupp, Rebecca Candlewick (256 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-5810-6 Daniel (E.) Anderson looks back on the summer he fell in love and finally came to terms with his soldier brother’s death. After Eli died in Iraq, Daniel added his initial to his own name and began compiling a Book of the Dead, a binder filled with his research on famous deaths. Three years later, still angry at his brother for joining the Army, the 14-year-old still keeps his book. Relevant entries, ranging from the princes in the Tower to Isadora Duncan and the 9/11 victims, begin each chapter of this poignant novel. Danny’s father is detached and displeased by everything; his mother, silent and withdrawn. But in the course of an idyllic summer spent with the beautiful Isabelle and her younger twin siblings, visiting from New York, Danny comes to terms with his brother’s death, finds a new, true friend in his dorky, formerly despised classmate Walter, and discovers that working on an organic farm is something 80

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he’s good at and cares about. Danny’s nostalgic first-person narration includes interestingly quirky information as well as sweet moments. Middle school readers will see the inevitable end of this first love long before Danny faces it, grieving his new loss but grateful for his healing. Far more than a summer romance, this is a tribute to those left behind. (Fiction. 11-15)

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE Sáenz, Benjamin Alire Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 21, 2012 978-1-4424-0892-0

A boring summer stretches ahead of Ari, who at 15 feels hemmed in by a life filled with rules and family secrets. He doesn’t know why his older brother is in prison, since his parents and adult sisters refuse to talk about it. His father also keeps his experience in Vietnam locked up inside. On a whim, Ari heads to the town swimming pool, where a boy he’s never met offers to teach him to swim. Ari, a loner who’s good in a fight, is caught off guard by the selfassured, artistic Dante. The two develop an easy friendship, ribbing each other about who is more Mexican, discussing life’s big questions, and wondering when they’ll be old enough to take on the world. An accident near the end of summer complicates their friendship while bringing their families closer. Sáenz’s interplay of poetic and ordinary speech beautifully captures this transitional time: “ ‘That’s a very Dante question,’ I said. ‘That’s a very Ari answer,’ he said.… For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.” Plot elements come together at the midpoint as Ari, adding up the parts of his life, begins to define himself. Meticulous pacing and finely nuanced characters underpin the author’s gift for affecting prose that illuminates the struggles within relationships. (Fiction. 14 & up)

PASSENGER

Smith, Andrew Feiwel & Friends (480 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 2, 2012 978-1-250-00487-1 The menacing, post-apocalyptic world of Marbury is again richly imagined in this stunning sequel to The Marbury Lens (2010). Four boys at the heart of the first novel return for another harrowing journey. Jack, whose abduction and near-rape was the catalyst that brought about his descent into Marbury, his best friend, Conner, and Ben and Griffin, two boys they first encountered in the teen

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alternate world, begin by attempting to destroy the lens that clutches Jack in its grip, compelling him to return repeatedly to the horrific world of cannibals, monsters and death. When they smash it, they inadvertently create a schism between dimensions—their hometown of Glenbrook becomes a terrifying mirror of Marbury with many variations in between—making escape nearly impossible. As in the first, readers will not be sure what is real, what is nightmare, what may be metaphor. Smith has created a fantastically effective, sinister setting and imbued it with characters that are loyal and decent, even at their most desperate. Unrelentingly harsh in tone and language (“Fuck this…I’ll show you who he is. We’ll fucking go kill him. I’ll bring back his fucking head”), this will be devoured by fans of the first, despite the fact that it offers few clear answers, right to the surprisingly gentle and wise conclusion. Brilliant and remarkably unsettling. (Horror/fantasy. 16 & up)

THE STATISTICAL PROBABILITY OF LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT Smith, Jennifer E. Poppy/Little, Brown (256 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 2, 2012 978-0-316-12238-2

A smartly observed novel rises above its apparently easy structure. Although her mother has made peace with the situation, Hadley is still angry and hurt that her father left them for an Englishwoman. Rebooked on the next flight after missing her plane to London, where she’s to be a bridesmaid in their wedding, Hadley is seated next to the English boy who helped her in the terminal. He comes to her rescue again after she confesses she suffers from claustrophobia. A good-looking Yale student, Oliver is smart, funny and thoughtful, though evasive about the purpose of his trip. Their mutual attraction is heightened by the limbo of air travel, but on arrival, they’re separated. With just minutes to get to the wedding, Hadley—resentful, anxious, missing Oliver and above all jet-lagged—makes her way to the church and the father she’s avoided seeing for a year. Narrative hooks and “meet-cutes” often seem designed to distract from less-thancompelling content. Here, the opposite pertains. Its one-day time frame and “what are the odds?” conceit bookend a closely observed, ultimately moving tale of love, family and otherwise. Yes, many teens face more compelling problems than those of a smart, attractive daughter of affluent and loving, if estranged, parents; but Smith’s acute insights make Hadley’s heartache and loss as real as the magical unfurling of new love. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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teen

THE RAVEN BOYS

Stiefvater, Maggie Scholastic (416 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-545-42492-9 978-0-545-46979-1 e-book Series: The Raven Cycle, 1 An ancient Welsh king may be buried in the Virginia countryside; three privileged boys hope to disinter him. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Blue Sargent, daughter of a small-town psychic, has lived her whole life under a prophecy: If she kisses her true love, he will die. Not that she plans on kissing anyone. Blue isn’t psychic, but she enhances the extrasensory power of anyone she’s near; while helping her aunt visualize the souls of people soon to die, she sees a vision of a dying Raven boy named Gansey. The Raven Boys—students at Aglionby, a nearby prep school, so-called because of the ravens on their school crest—soon encounter Blue in person. From then on, the point of view shifts among Blue; Gansey, a trust-fund kid obsessed with finding King Glendower buried on a ley-line in Virginia; and Adam, a scholarship student obsessed with his own self-sufficiency. Add Ronan, whose violent insouciance comes from seeing his father die, and Noah, whose first words in the book are, “I’ve been dead for seven years,” and you’ve got a story very few writers could dream up and only Stiefvater could make so palpably real. Simultaneously complex and simple, compulsively readable, marvelously wrought. The only flaw is that this is Book 1; it may be months yet before Book 2 comes out. The magic is entirely pragmatic; the impossible, extraordinarily true. (Fantasy. 13 & up)

PASSION BLUE

Strauss, Victoria Amazon Children’s Publishing (352 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 6, 2012 978-0-7614-6230-9 978-0-7614-6231-6 e-book Giulia is bright, curious and a gifted artist, born to a noble father and his humble mistress in 15th-century Renaissance Italy. Now her fate rests with her father’s widow, who’s sending Giulia to a Padua convent. Desperate to avoid a cloistered life, Giulia obtains a talisman that’s promised to deliver her heart’s desire: marriage to a good man and a home of her own. Convent life is hard. Highborn nuns enjoy freedom; others, like Giulia, labor at menial tasks. When her artistic talent’s discovered, she’s invited to join the close-knit group of artist nuns whose renowned work helps support the convent. Guided by Maestra Humilità, daughter of a famous artist, Giulia begins to learn this exacting craft with tasks like mixing egg tempera. Artists create their own colors, |

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

their recipes closely guarded secrets. Humilità’s precious passion blue is one; its beauty draws Giulia like a flame. So do visions of love and freedom beyond convent walls. But stealing away to meet handsome Ormanno, another talented artist, is risky. Fantasy elements and a historical setting rich with sensuous detail are satisfying, but it’s Giulia’s achingly real search for her heart’s desire that resonates most today, when millions of girls still have limited choices. A rare, rewarding, sumptuous exploration of artistic passion. (author’s note) (Historical fantasy. 12 & up)

DRAMA

Telgemeier, Raina Illus. by Telgemeier, Raina Graphix/Scholastic (240 pp.) $23.99 | paper$10.99 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-545-32698-8 978-0-545-32699-5 paperback From award winner Telgemeier (Smile, 2010), a pitch-perfect graphic novel portrayal of a middle school musical, adroitly capturing the drama both on

and offstage. Seventh-grader Callie Marin is over-the-moon to be on stage crew again this year for Eucalyptus Middle School’s production of Moon over Mississippi. Callie’s just getting over popular baseball jock and eighth-grader Greg, who crushed her when he left Callie to return to his girlfriend, Bonnie, the stuck-up star of the play. Callie’s healing heart is quickly captured by Justin and Jesse Mendocino, the two very cute twins who are working on the play with her. Equally determined to make the best sets possible with a shoestring budget and to get one of the Mendocino boys to notice her, the immensely likable Callie will find this to be an extremely drama-filled experience indeed. The palpably engaging and whip-smart characterization ensures that the charisma and camaraderie run high among those working on the production. When Greg snubs Callie in the halls and misses her reference to Guys and Dolls, one of her friends assuredly tells her, “Don’t worry, Cal. We’re the cool kids….He’s the dork.” With the clear, stylish art, the strongly appealing characters and just the right pinch of drama, this book will undoubtedly make readers stand up and cheer. Brava! (Graphic fiction. 10-14)

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

THE GIRL WHO FELL BENEATH FAIRYLAND AND LED THE REVELS THERE Valente, Catherynne M. Illus. by Juan, Ana Feiwel & Friends (272 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 2, 2012 978-0-312-64962-3

In this sequel to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011), heroine September embarks on another quest, this time to Fairyland-Below, where her shadow rules as queen. It’s been a year since September saved Fairyland after sacrificing her shadow and returned home to Nebraska, where she carries the secret of her adventure “with her like a pair of rich gloves which...she could take out and slip” on. On her 13th birthday, September chases a peculiar boat across the wheat fields and falls into Fairyland-Below, a dark region without rules. There, everything’s “upside down and slantwise,” shadows are siphoned from Fairyland and September’s shadow, Halloween, orchestrates wild nightly revels. September resolutely pledges to recover all missing shadows, including her own, by traveling to the very bottom of Fairyland to awaken the Sleeping Prince. Her deliberate descent into dark, surreal places where she encounters bizarre, fantastical creatures is chronicled by the perceptive narrator whose familiarity with fairy-tale tradition matches September’s self-conscious determination to behave “as a heroine.” Sophisticated, prodigious blending of familiar and original storytelling elements adds multilayered texture, while the rich prose oozes exotic, imaginative imagery. Juan’s black-and-white spot art highlights September’s questing. Heartless September sprouts a heart during this remarkable, awesome journey. (Fantasy. 10-14)

DOUBLE

Valentine, Jenny Hyperion (256 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 21, 2012 978-1-4231-4714-5 What are the odds of two identical missing boys? The possibility will haunt readers in this British import by Morris Award finalist Valentine. When 16-year-old runaway Chap, named by his reclusive grandfather, gets locked up for fighting in a London hostel, detectives are certain that they’ve found missing Cassiel Roadnight, who disappeared two years ago on the firework-filled Hay on Fire fall festival. Longing for a real family, Chap assumes Cass’ identity and tries to ingratiate himself with the Roadnights as he moves into their home. Weighed down by his lies and the family’s doubts (“Your eyes used to be blue”), his ruse is not as easy to carry out as he imagined. Chap’s spare, first-person narration teen

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“This riveting exploration of physical appearance and the status it confers opens a cultural conversation that’s needed to happen for a long time.” from the list

intensifies this taut, psychological thriller as he also begins to wonder why and how Cass disappeared. Flashbacks, fraught with identity, loss and betrayal, fill in the back story on Chap’s own life, which is just as mysterious as Cass’. Piecing together clues from his and Cass’ lives, Chap can’t help but believe that he may be living with Cass’ killer. With the next Hay on Fire quickly approaching, will Chap meet the same fate as Cass? Readers who like the quick pace of Gail Giles’ mysteries and the dark, finely crafted suspense of Kevin Brooks will find the perfect combination here. (Thriller. 12 & up)

A TROUBLESOME BOY

Vasey, Paul Groundwood (232 pp.) $16.95 | paper$9.95 | $9.95 e-book May 15, 2012 978-1-55498-154-0 978-1-55498-155-7 paperback 978-1-55498-201-1 e-book When 14-year-old Teddy is classified as troublesome, disrespectful and defiant of authority, his despised stepfather sends him off to St. Ignatius Academy for Boys, an isolated Roman Catholic boarding school. St. Iggy’s is run by priests who ruthlessly enforce discipline through intimidation and abuse. Narrator Teddy befriends the wisecracking, Wordsworth-loving Cooper. The boys use their wits and humor to cope, but the endless beatings and humiliations take their toll, especially on the fragile Cooper. He reaches his breaking point when he becomes the victim of Father Prince, a pedophile. Teddy watches helplessly as Cooper withdraws into his own private nightmare, and Prince targets Teddy himself as his next victim. The only positive adult relationship the boys have at school is with the janitor, who takes them to his farmhouse outside of town on Saturdays to enjoy a brief period of normalcy. The priests are either bullies or predators; even Brother Joe, who seems sympathetic to Teddy, betrays his trust. Although set in a well-realized 1959, Vasey’s brisk, sharply written, riveting narrative transcends any time period. A vivid, disturbing and all-too-real topical story. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

THE LIST

Vivian, Siobhan Scholastic (336 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-545-16917-2 This riveting exploration of physical appearance and the status it confers opens a cultural conversation that’s needed to happen for a long time. Every year during homecoming week, a list is posted anonymously at Mount Washington High naming the prettiest and ugliest girls in each class. Abby, who finds it easier to get credit for her looks than hard work, and |

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Danielle, whose swimmer’s physique gets her labeled “ugly,” are this year’s freshman duo. The list confers instant status, transforming formerly home-schooled sophomore Lauren from geeky to hot while consigning her counterpart, pretty-but-mean Candace, to pariah. But what the label mainly confers is anxiety. Prettiest junior Bridget despairs that she’ll ever be thin enough to merit her title; Sarah takes refuge in anger, vowing to earn her ugly label big-time. Jennifer, four-time “ugliest” winner, tries to relish the notoriety. Margo’s title should make her the slamdunk choice for homecoming queen, but will it? Whether clued in or clueless to the intricate social complexities, boyfriends reinforce the status quo, while moms carry scars of their own past physical insecurities. The issue is seldom front and center in books for teens, but Vivian refuses to falsify or avoid the uncomfortable realities that looks alone confer status, and their power is greatest when obscured by the pretense that “looks don’t matter.” (Fiction. 12 & up)

THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW

Wasserman, Robin Knopf (448 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 Jan. 10, 2012 978-0-375-86876-4 978-0-375-89961-4 e-book 978-0-375-96876-1 PLB Here’s something refreshing: a religious-historical thriller with a nifty Mobius strip of a plot— think Nancy Werlin channeling Dan Brown—serving up shivery suspense, sans fangs or fur. Battered by family tragedy, high school senior Nora has been sleepwalking through life in her chilly New England town. Knowing her facility in Latin, Chris and his roommate, Max, talk her into helping translate letters relating to Edward Kelley, a prominent 16th-century alchemist. Sidelined into working on his daughter’s letters, Nora learns of the Lumen Dei (the alchemical MacGuffin), sought down the centuries by religious fanatics. Pairing up, Max and Nora form a bond with Chris and his girlfriend, Adriane, that’s severed when Chris is brutally murdered. Adriane, the only witness, is catatonic, and Max has vanished, leaving Nora on her own until Chris’s cousin Eli arrives to collect Chris’s effects and keep an eye on her. A cryptic message from Max sends Nora, joined by the semi-recovered Adriane and stalked by Eli, to the mean streets of Prague. The teen designation feels less content- than market-driven. While depictions of violence and sexuality are more muted than the title suggests, Nora’s sensibility, casual independence and vocabulary are entirely adult. A classy read that repays reader effort. (historical note) (Thriller. 12 & up)

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

“Each character is carefully drawn, and the sense of family among the street crew and the racism in the gay community are palpable without the author ever telling readers what to think.” from street dreams

CODE NAME VERITY

Wein, Elizabeth Hyperion (352 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | May 15, 2012 978-1-4231-5219-4 978-1-4231-5325-2 e-book Breaking away from Arthurian legends (The Winter Prince, 1993, etc.), Wein delivers a heartbreaking tale of friendship during World War II. In a cell in Nazi-occupied France, a young woman writes. Like Scheherezade, to whom she is compared by the SS officer in charge of her case, she dribbles out information—“everything I can remember about the British War Effort”—in exchange for time and a reprieve from torture. But her story is more than a listing of wireless codes or aircraft types. Instead, she describes her friendship with Maddie, the pilot who flew them to France, as well as the real details of the British War Effort: the breaking down of class barriers, the opportunities, the fears and victories not only of war, but of daily life. She also describes, almost casually, her unbearable current situation and the SS officer who holds her life in his hands and his beleaguered female associate, who translates the narrative each day. Through the layers of story, characters (including the Nazis) spring to life. And as the epigraph makes clear, there is more to this tale than is immediately apparent. The twists will lead readers to finish the last page and turn back to the beginning to see how the pieces slot perfectly, unexpectedly into place. A carefully researched, precisely written tour de force; unforgettable and wrenching. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

STREET DREAMS

Wiseman, Tama Bold Strokes Books (264 pp.) $13.95 paperback | Mar. 13, 2012 978-1-60282-650-2 Compassionate, thoughtful and expressive, this New Zealand import traces a Maori teen’s journey through friendships, family, work and the realization that he is gay. Modest, practical, local-hip-hop–loving Tyson spots a confident, young, white street promoter in a basketball jersey and for the first time feels something he thinks might be love at first sight. Tyson spends his life caring for others: He works nights as a dishwasher to support his mother and two younger brothers, and he looks out for his best mate Rawiri, loyally ignoring the bruises Rawiri sometimes receives at home. Propelled by two friends’ encouragement to follow his dreams and his growing interest in the figure he thinks of as “the white homeboy,” Tyson begins to make changes. He calls a gay hotline for support and allows himself to be pulled into a crew of street artists who respect his drawing talents even while their leader spews homophobic bile. Each character is carefully drawn, and 84

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the sense of family among the street crew and the racism in the gay community are palpable without the author ever telling readers what to think. The language, though inflected with regional slang and the names of local hip-hop artists, is both accessible and lyrical. No simple coming-out story, this many-layered effort is gritty, warm and ultimately hopeful. (Fiction. 14 & up)

BENEATH A METH MOON

Woodson, Jacqueline Nancy Paulsen Books (192 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 2, 2012 978-0-399-25250-1 Fifteen-year-old Laurel attempts to understand and move past a year of her life when addiction to methamphetamine nearly cost her family and her life. Laurel and her family suffered devastating loss when her mother and grandmother were victims of a terrible storm (probably Katrina, from the timeline) in Pass Christian, Miss. Finally, they seem to be settling into a new life, in a new town, with new friends. Laurel joins the cheerleading squad and catches the eye of the school’s star athlete. Unfortunately, he is a methamphetamine, or “moon,” user. Before long, she joins him and begins a downward spiral that results in painful estrangement from all she loves. Life on the streets brings her into the path of Moses, who has known his own loss and uses his artistic ability to pay tribute to young people who are caught in the drug snare. Margaret A. Edwards Award winner Woodson crafts a story of powerful emotional intensity through her poignant portrayal of a young woman lost and in pain. The depiction of small-town life, with its Dollar Store, Wal-Mart and limited economic opportunities adds texture and authenticity. This is beautifully written, with clear prose that honors the story it tells: “Hard not to think about not deserving this kind of beauty, this kind of cold. This…this clarity.” Most of all, it is populated with fully realized characters who struggle to make sense of tragedy. Laurel’s friend Kaylee urges her to “[w]rite an elegy to the past…and move on.” A moving, honest and hopeful story. (Fiction. 14 & up)

CATCH & RELEASE

Woolston, Blythe Carolrhoda Lab (216 pp.) $17.95 | $12.95 e-book | Feb. 1, 2012 978-0-7613-7755-9 978-0-7613-8725-1 e-book Eighteen-year-old Polly recounts her road trip with Odd, a fellow survivor of the disease that killed five others from their small town, in D’Elegance, his Gramma’s old baby-blue Cadillac. teen

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Fishing is ostensibly the purpose of their outing, and it symbolically charts the way the two teens process their disabilities. Polly once had a boyfriend and a sense of a normal future, and she now calls her former self “Polly-That-Was,” since Bridger has vanished with the disfigurement of her face and loss of an eye from MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Odd Estes lost a foot as well as some football buddies, and although the two barely knew each other before, they both now struggle to accommodate their good fortune in surviving and their misfortune of disability. Swearing, booze and weed are along for the journey, which takes them from their hometown somewhere near Yellowstone toward Portland, Ore. Neither teen is particularly articulate, but Polly’s first-person narration is as snarky and devastatingly honest as she is. Odd and Polly move from isolation to a mutual connection that helps them deal with their pain. This is not a romance, but a tale of two people thrown together after their world has been turned upside down. Each is unique, vividly complicated and true. Engaging writing and characters lift this above the typical clichéd story of disabled teens. Heartbreakingly honest. (Fiction. 14 & up)

MARATHON

Yakin, Boaz Illus. by Infurnari, Joe First Second/Roaring Brook (192 pp.) $16.99 paperback | Jun. 19, 2012 978-1-59643-680-0 Retold in expressionistic blurs of action, this account of the battle of Marathon chronicles at once a glorious win for the underdogs and an awe-inspiring personal achievement. Cruel Hippias, former king of Athens, is on his way back with a huge army of Persians to reclaim the throne and crush Athenian democracy. As the city’s squabbling and much smaller forces hustle to meet the invaders, Eucles, Athens’ best runner, is charged to race the 153 miles to Sparta in hopes of finding an ally. Battling heat, sun, bandits and pursuing enemy troops, Eucles makes the trek, then makes it in reverse with the dismaying news that the Spartans will not be coming in time. He joins the savage fight and then runs 26 more miles over rugged mountains to Athens—dying on arrival but not before both announcing the victory and warning of an impending surprise attack by sea. Using sepia washes to indicate present time and black and white for flashbacks, Infurnari fills patchwork panels with glimpses of rugged faces, slashing swords and jumbles of martial action with “KLAK” “CHK!” sound effects. Yakin draws from ancient historical and legendary sources but adds invented incidents to round out Eucles’ character and elevated dialogue to heighten the epic atmosphere: “The gods have laid a feast both bitter and sweet before me.” Among the most historically and culturally significant battles ever fought, Marathon gets righteous due—and so does its greatest hero. (Graphic historical fiction. 12-15)

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teen

DUST GIRL

Zettel, Sarah Random House (304 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 Jun. 26, 2012 978-0-375-86938-9 978-0-375-98318-4 e-book 978-0-375-96938-6 PLB Series: The American Fairy Trilogy, 1 A mixed-race girl in Dust Bowl Kansas discovers her long-lost father isn’t just a black man: He’s a fairy. Callie has been passing as white her whole life, helping her Mama in run-down Slow Run, Kan. But now it doesn’t seem to matter that she keeps her “good skin” out of the sun and softens her “coarse” hair, because it seems everyone’s left the dust-choked town. Even Mama is gone now, vanished in a preternatural dust storm that summoned a strange man who tells Callie secrets of her never-met father. Soon Callie’s walking the dusty roads with Jack, a ragged white kid. If Callie’s dad is a fairy, then the two young’uns will just have to go to fairyland to find him. Callie and Jack dodge fairy politics and dangers, from grasshopper people to enchanted food to magic movie theaters—but the conventional dangers are no less threatening. Plenty of run-of-the-mill humans in 1935 Kansas don’t like black girls or beggars, hobos or outsiders. With a historical note and a Woody Guthrie soundtrack, this novel does a fine job of blending a splendidly grounded Dust Bowl setting with a paranormal adventure. It’s really too bad that the cover art depicts a white girl with flyaway hair, rather than Callie as written, a mixed girl who stops passing as white halfway through the story. Callie learns to be open about herself but her own cover art doesn’t. This cracking good mixture of magic and place will leave readers eagerly awaiting the sequel. (Fantasy. 12-14)

This Issue’s Contributors # Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Louise Brueggemann • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Carol Edwards • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Judith Gire • Ruth I. Gordon • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Jennifer Hubert • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Deborah Kaplan • K. Lesley Knieriem • Angela Leeper • Ellen Loughran • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • R. Moore • Kathleen Odean • John Edward Peters • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Shana Raphaeli • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Dean Schneider • Karyn N. Silverman • Paula Singer • Edward T. Sullivan • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Gordon West • Monica Wyatt

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

top 25 teen books

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL Jesse Andrews Amulet/Abrams

THE DIVINERS

FRIENDS WITH BOYS

THE ASSASSIN’S CURSE

Libba Bray Little, Brown

Faith Erin Hicks Illus. by Faith Erin Hicks First Second/Roaring Brook

Cassandra Rose Clarke Strange Chemistry

MOONBIRD MASTER OF DECEIT Marc Aronson Candlewick

Phillip Hoose Farrar, Straus and Giroux

LOVE AND OTHER PERISHABLE ITEMS

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

Laura Buzo Knopf

emily m. danforth Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins

THE CHAOS Nalo Hopkinson McElderry

WONDER SHOW Hannah Barnaby Houghton Mifflin

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

BITTERBLUE Kristin Cashore Dial

John Green Dutton

KEEPING THE CASTLE Patrice Kindl Viking 86

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

teen

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top 25 t e e n b o o k s ( c o n t. )

ASK THE PASSENGERS A.S. King Little, Brown

SEE YOU AT HARRY’S Jo Knowles Candlewick

IN DARKNESS Nick Lake Bloomsbury

NO CRYSTAL STAIR

EVERY DAY

THE RAVEN BOYS

David Levithan Knopf

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson Illus. by R. Gregory Christie Carolrhoda Lab

BE MY ENEMY

THE GIRL WITH BORROWED WINGS

CODE NAME VERITY

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

BENEATH A METH MOON

Ian McDonald Pyr/Prometheus Books

Rinsai Rossetti Dial

INVINCIBLE MICROBE Jim Murphy Clarion

Benjamin Alire Sáenz Simon & Schuster

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Maggie Stiefvater Scholastic

Elizabeth Wein Hyperion

Jacqueline Woodson Nancy Paulsen Books

best nonfiction and teen books of 2012

On Sale January 15, 2013 The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself. Through her still-astonished eyes, Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this warm and honest book, destined to become a classic of self-invention and self-discovery.

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