Janet Maslin’s Picks for 2011
By JANET MASLIN
DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A TALE OF MADNESS, MEDICINE AND THE MURDER OF A PRESIDENT by Candice Millard. A staggering tale about the American presidency by a historian who, as she did in “The River of Doubt,” her book about Theodore Roosevelt, zeroes in on what other historians overlook. Ms. Millard digs deeply into the turmoil that got James A. Garfield elected, the lunacy that got him shot and the medical malfeasance that turned a minor wound into a mortal one. Her story is so full of outsize figures — not least of them the unexpectedly noble Garfield — that Alexander Graham Bell is only a bit player. (Doubleday, $28.95)
JUST MY TYPE: A BOOK ABOUT FONTS by Simon Garfield. This gleeful survey of typefaces illuminates their histories, uses and meanings. Got a font fetish yet? Mr. Garfield will happily give you one and make sure that you never look at a logo, ad or traffic sign in quite the same way. Not for nothing was Steve Jobs enough of a font fan to make font choice a basic Apple feature. Not for nothing do font wonks fight about relative merits of different ampersands. Ever wonder how the @ sign is described by Czechs? As a roll-mop herring. (Gotham Books, $27.50)
STEVE JOBS by Walter Isaacson. This biography is essential reading, though its insights are not particularly intimate or deep. Here is the authorized version of how an astounding array of devices was created, right down to the tiniest nuances — and an account of how all of Mr. Jobs’s creations reflect his turbulent nature. Here too is a story of remarkable alchemy: an explanation of how Mr. Jobs fused the ’70s-era West Coast cultures of music, microchips, meditation and extreme physical bravado into an ethos of exquisite simplicity. Find out how and why he rocked your world. (Simon & Schuster, $35)
YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE by Siobhan Fallon. This lean, hard-hitting short-story collection outshone some of the year’s most imposing doorstop-size novels. Ms. Fallon knew firsthand what life was like for military spouses at Fort Hood, Tex., when she wrote these loosely interlocking tales about their shaky camaraderie and lonely ordeals. A husband comes home from Baghdad to find his worst fears realized. In one of Ms. Fallon’s typically fierce moments, he stands above his sleeping wife and her lover, holding his knife like “a judge’s gavel raised,” not knowing himself where it will land. (Amy Einhorn Books/G. P. Putnam’s Sons, $23.95)
SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell. Nobody’s pulse ever quickened at the idea of a novel about a family of alligator wrestlers in a dilapidated Florida theme park. But Ms. Russell is that rare writer who can use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect. And there is nothing cute about her book’s idiosyncratic charms. This is a family story distinguished by ghosts, gators, a wildly febrile physical environment (“our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly”), exceptional command of language and darkly idiosyncratic humor. It is strange at the start and unforgettable by the time it’s over. (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95)
IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: LOVE, TERROR AND AN AMERICAN FAMILY IN HITLER’S BERLIN by Erik Larson. Novelistic nonfiction doesn’t get any more gripping than this. Mr. Larson draws upon the writings of William E. Dodd, who was appointed the American ambassador to Germany in 1933, and the even more unguarded writings of Martha Dodd Stern, his self-styled ingénue of a daughter. There are plenty of hindsight-laden books about Hitler’s rise, with its atmosphere of fear and mounting oppression. But there has been nothing quite like Mr. Larson’s true chronicle of the myopic Dodds, unlikely innocents abroad, who found themselves caught in a new Germany full of nasty surprises. (Crown, $26)
RAWHIDE DOWN: THE NEAR ASSASSINATION OF RONALD REAGAN by Del Quentin Wilber. In this newly revealing account of the shooting of President Reagan 30 years ago, Mr. Wilber provides the firsthand testimony of doctors, hospital workers, former Secret Service agents and other close witnesses who were not in a position to speak about the attack when it occurred — and who had not been asked much about it in the intervening years. Surprised at how lightly the incident had been taken, Mr. Wilber reconstructs an episode much more serious and dire than it has been made to seem. The courage of the president, the delicacy of the situation faced by his doctors and the sloppiness of security measures are all given new attention. (Henry Holt & Company, $27)
MOBY-DUCK: THE TRUE STORY OF 28,800 BATH TOYS LOST AT SEA AND OF THE BEACHCOMBERS, OCEANOGRAPHERS, ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND FOOLS, INCLUDING THE AUTHOR, WHO WENT IN SEARCH OF THEM by Donovan Hohn. A tale about rubber ducks gone amok, written by an endlessly inquisitive schoolteacher, full of questions about what happened to a toy shipment lost at sea. How much cargo vanishes that way, and where does it go? What kind of people hunt this flotsam, anyhow? What are the politics of duck dumping? What kind of weather patterns exist underwater? Mr. Hohn provides seafaring adventure, scientific inquiry and all the humor that the title “Moby-Duck” promises. (Viking, $27.95)
LOST MEMORY OF SKIN by Russell Banks. Mr. Banks’s tough, sprawling novel is his best in years, tackling difficult and topical subject matter. He has written many times about virtue and how it can be eroded. Now he transfers those concerns to the Internet age, in which identity can be blurred and lives ruined forever by bad judgment. Mr. Banks’s main character, called the Kid, is legally designated a sex offender, but this book is suspenseful in revealing exactly what made him a pariah. An obese, mysterious and vaguely sinister Professor takes a strong and peculiar interest in the Kid, adding another layer of eeriness to an already deeply chilling novel. (Ecco, $25.99)
THEN AGAIN by Diane Keaton. A far-reaching, heartbreaking, crystal-clear collage of a book about mothers, daughters, childhood, aging, mortality, joyfulness, love, work and so much more. Show business too: Ms. Keaton weaves her love affairs with three very famous film luminaries into the larger tapestry of her life with family and friends. Now 65, Ms. Keaton packs an emotional wallop by juxtaposing her happiness as the mother of young children with the agonizing final stages of her parents’ lives. (Random House, $26)
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011
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November 21, 2011
Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011
By DWIGHT GARNER
ALFRED KAZIN’S JOURNALS by Alfred Kazin. The great American literary critic Alfred Kazin’s passions — for sex, for novels, for ideas, for talk, for city life — spill from these journals, edited by his biographer, Richard M. Cook. This is one of the great diaries and moral documents of the past American century. What it lacks in cohesiveness it makes up in its frankness, its quick-pivoting angularities. Kazin dismisses his journals at one point as a “disorderly pile of shavings.” That disorder only adds to their amplitude. (Yale University Press, $45)
THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Peter Englund. This intense and bighearted book, from a Swedish historian and journalist, contains few banner names, famous battles or major treaties. Instead it threads together the often moving and harrowing wartime experiences of 20 more or less unknown men and women. It’s not so much a book about what happened, the talented author explains, as “a book about what it was like.” It’s about “feelings, impressions, experiences and moods.” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35)
CHAVS: THE DEMONIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS by Owen Jones. The noun chav, in Britain, essentially means “ugly prole”: loutish, tacky, probably drunken and possibly violent. Think Snooki with a cockney accent. Mr. Jones’s book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: “How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?” His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage. (Verso, $23.95)
IPHIGENIA IN FOREST HILLS: ANATOMY OF A MURDER TRIAL by Janet Malcolm. Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story. (Yale University Press, $25)
IS JOURNALISM WORTH DYING FOR? FINAL DISPATCHES by Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist who was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in Moscow in 2006, wrote about the dark side of Vladimir V. Putin’s reign: the brutal war in Chechnya; the top-to-bottom thuggery and corruption; the lack of an independent judiciary; the “bureaucratic black magic” that could poison, or snuff out, a life at a moment’s notice. Her prose fit her subject: it was mostly hard and balefully direct, wormy with unpleasant truths. This book collects some of her last and best work. (Melville House, $19.95)
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE HUMAN CONDITION: SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1989-2010 by Geoff Dyer. Mr. Dyer, a shape-shifting British writer, is among the best essayists on the planet, and this book includes some of his finest work. He casts an almost perversely wide net here. There are pieces about Ian McEwan and the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue and the jazz cornet player Don Cherry. He goes on tour with the aging rockers in Def Leppard and goes up in a decommissioned Russian MIG-29 fighter plane. He wanders though Camus’s Algeria. He reflects upon the joy of having sex in good hotels. What these essays impart is ecstasy. (Graywolf Press, $18)
PULPHEAD: ESSAYS by John Jeremiah Sullivan. From a demonically talented Southern writer, essays on topics as varied as Axl Rose, Tennessee cave systems and the Southern Agrarian literary movement. The putty that binds them is Mr. Sullivan’s steady, subversive and unhurried voice. Reading him, I felt the way Mr. Sullivan does while listening to a Bunny Wailer song called “Let Him Go.” That is, I felt “like a puck on an air-hockey table that’s been switched on.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16)
RADIOACTIVE: MARIE & PIERRE CURIE: A TALE OF LOVE AND FALLOUT by Lauren Redniss. This illustrated biography of Marie and Pierre Curie lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion. This book is an unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long, literate and supple. Her drawings are ambitious and spooky. Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that has become a dream city. (It Books, $29.99)
TOWNIE: A MEMOIR by Andre Dubus III. This is a sleek muscle car of a memoir that growls like an amalgam of work by Richard Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic, Breece D’J Pancake and Dennis Lehane, set to the desolate thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Mr. Dubus is the son of the writer Andre Dubus, a father who wasn’t around for most of the author’s difficult and impoverished childhood. This book could become, and I mean this fondly, one hell of a Ben Affleck movie. (W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95)
THE VOYAGE OF THE ROSE CITY: AN ADVENTURE AT SEA by John Moynihan. This posthumously published book, from the son of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, tells the story of how the author left Wesleyan University during the summer of his junior year and joined the merchant marine. He spent four months crossing the equator on an oil supertanker called the Rose City. This is a young man’s book, for sure; it was written when its author was barely 20. But Moynihan has a good story to tell, one that’s flecked with briny bits of Melville and Conrad and Raban. His unshowy prose has genuine immediacy. He’s never less than frank, funny company on the page. (Spiegel & Grau, $22)
November 21, 2011
Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011
By DWIGHT GARNER
ALFRED KAZIN’S JOURNALS by Alfred Kazin. The great American literary critic Alfred Kazin’s passions — for sex, for novels, for ideas, for talk, for city life — spill from these journals, edited by his biographer, Richard M. Cook. This is one of the great diaries and moral documents of the past American century. What it lacks in cohesiveness it makes up in its frankness, its quick-pivoting angularities. Kazin dismisses his journals at one point as a “disorderly pile of shavings.” That disorder only adds to their amplitude. (Yale University Press, $45)
THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Peter Englund. This intense and bighearted book, from a Swedish historian and journalist, contains few banner names, famous battles or major treaties. Instead it threads together the often moving and harrowing wartime experiences of 20 more or less unknown men and women. It’s not so much a book about what happened, the talented author explains, as “a book about what it was like.” It’s about “feelings, impressions, experiences and moods.” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35)
CHAVS: THE DEMONIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS by Owen Jones. The noun chav, in Britain, essentially means “ugly prole”: loutish, tacky, probably drunken and possibly violent. Think Snooki with a cockney accent. Mr. Jones’s book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: “How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?” His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage. (Verso, $23.95)
IPHIGENIA IN FOREST HILLS: ANATOMY OF A MURDER TRIAL by Janet Malcolm. Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story. (Yale University Press, $25)
IS JOURNALISM WORTH DYING FOR? FINAL DISPATCHES by Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist who was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in Moscow in 2006, wrote about the dark side of Vladimir V. Putin’s reign: the brutal war in Chechnya; the top-to-bottom thuggery and corruption; the lack of an independent judiciary; the “bureaucratic black magic” that could poison, or snuff out, a life at a moment’s notice. Her prose fit her subject: it was mostly hard and balefully direct, wormy with unpleasant truths. This book collects some of her last and best work. (Melville House, $19.95)
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE HUMAN CONDITION: SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1989-2010 by Geoff Dyer. Mr. Dyer, a shape-shifting British writer, is among the best essayists on the planet, and this book includes some of his finest work. He casts an almost perversely wide net here. There are pieces about Ian McEwan and the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue and the jazz cornet player Don Cherry. He goes on tour with the aging rockers in Def Leppard and goes up in a decommissioned Russian MIG-29 fighter plane. He wanders though Camus’s Algeria. He reflects upon the joy of having sex in good hotels. What these essays impart is ecstasy. (Graywolf Press, $18)
PULPHEAD: ESSAYS by John Jeremiah Sullivan. From a demonically talented Southern writer, essays on topics as varied as Axl Rose, Tennessee cave systems and the Southern Agrarian literary movement. The putty that binds them is Mr. Sullivan’s steady, subversive and unhurried voice. Reading him, I felt the way Mr. Sullivan does while listening to a Bunny Wailer song called “Let Him Go.” That is, I felt “like a puck on an air-hockey table that’s been switched on.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16)
RADIOACTIVE: MARIE & PIERRE CURIE: A TALE OF LOVE AND FALLOUT by Lauren Redniss. This illustrated biography of Marie and Pierre Curie lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion. This book is an unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long, literate and supple. Her drawings are ambitious and spooky. Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that has become a dream city. (It Books, $29.99)
TOWNIE: A MEMOIR by Andre Dubus III. This is a sleek muscle car of a memoir that growls like an amalgam of work by Richard Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic, Breece D’J Pancake and Dennis Lehane, set to the desolate thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Mr. Dubus is the son of the writer Andre Dubus, a father who wasn’t around for most of the author’s difficult and impoverished childhood. This book could become, and I mean this fondly, one hell of a Ben Affleck movie. (W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95)
THE VOYAGE OF THE ROSE CITY: AN ADVENTURE AT SEA by John Moynihan. This posthumously published book, from the son of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, tells the story of how the author left Wesleyan University during the summer of his junior year and joined the merchant marine. He spent four months crossing the equator on an oil supertanker called the Rose City. This is a young man’s book, for sure; it was written when its author was barely 20. But Moynihan has a good story to tell, one that’s flecked with briny bits of Melville and Conrad and Raban. His unshowy prose has genuine immediacy. He’s never less than frank, funny company on the page. (Spiegel & Grau, $22)
Michiko Kakutani’s Picks for 2011
November 21, 2011
Michiko Kakutani’s Picks for 2011
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF REMEMBERING EVERYTHING by Joshua Foer. A smart, funny meditation on the mysteries of memory featuring the author, in a Plimpton-esque turn, undergoing a year of memory training and competing against the country’s best mental athletes in the U.S.A. Memory Championships. (The Penguin Press, $26.95)
VAN GOGH: THE LIFE by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This minutely detailed biography of the Dutch painter explicates his life and art and the alchemy between them, chronicling his struggles with depression, his perseverance in the face of continuing rejection, his voracious assimilation of other artists’ techniques and the radiant evolution of his work. (Random House, $40)
ROME: A CULTURAL, VISUAL AND PERSONAL HISTORY by Robert Hughes. The former art critic of Time magazine gives us a guided tour through the city of Rome, excavating its bloody past and deconstructing its artistic masterpieces even as he creates an indelible portrait of a city that still stands today as “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error.” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35)
THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: NINE STORIES by Don DeLillo. This collection of short fiction, written between 1979 and 2011, offers telling insights into the author’s fascination with the chaotic margins of contemporary life. The title story, featuring two nuns who work in the desolate South Bronx, is a small miracle of storytelling in itself. (Scribner, $24)
THE TALIBAN SHUFFLE: STRANGE DAYS IN AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN by Kim Barker. In recounting her adventures as a reporter in one of the most dangerous regions of the world, the author captures both the serious and the seriously absurd conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, using black humor to convey the sad-awful-frequently-insane incongruities of war. (Doubleday, $25.95)
THE PALE KING by David Foster Wallace. Pieced together from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, this sprawling novel, set largely at an Internal Revenue Service office in the Midwest, depicts a nation plagued by tedium and meaningless bureaucracy. By turns brilliant and stupefying, maddening and elegiac, it’s a book that sheds new, retrospective light on Wallace’s hallucinatory vision of America. (Little, Brown & Company, $27.99)
THE TIGER’S WIFE by Téa Obreht. In creating a portrait of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war, this stunning debut novel moves seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary colored world of fable, exploring the role that storytelling plays in people’s lives when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval. (Random House, $25)
BLUE NIGHTS by Joan Didion. An elliptical yet searing inquiry into loss, this devastating memoir traces the author’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her daughter Quintana Roo — who died in 2005 at age 39 — and to understand Quintana’s life. Moving back and forth between recent painful memories and bright family snapshots from the past, the book becomes a melancholy meditation on mortality and time. (Alfred A. Knopf, $25)
THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach. This accomplished first novel is not only a baseball classic — right up there in the pantheon with “The Natural” by Bernard Malamud — but it’s also an affecting story about friendship and coming of age, tracing the intertwined lives of five engaging characters at a small college near Lake Michigan. (Little, Brown & Company, $25.99)
BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD by Michael Lewis. Using his uncommon ability to make virtually any subject interesting, the author takes us on a surreal trip through some of the countries hardest hit by the 2008 fiscal tsunami — including Greece, Iceland and Ireland — and in doing so, makes understanding today’s headlines about European sovereign debt both fascinating and lucid. (W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95)
Michiko Kakutani’s Picks for 2011
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF REMEMBERING EVERYTHING by Joshua Foer. A smart, funny meditation on the mysteries of memory featuring the author, in a Plimpton-esque turn, undergoing a year of memory training and competing against the country’s best mental athletes in the U.S.A. Memory Championships. (The Penguin Press, $26.95)
VAN GOGH: THE LIFE by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This minutely detailed biography of the Dutch painter explicates his life and art and the alchemy between them, chronicling his struggles with depression, his perseverance in the face of continuing rejection, his voracious assimilation of other artists’ techniques and the radiant evolution of his work. (Random House, $40)
ROME: A CULTURAL, VISUAL AND PERSONAL HISTORY by Robert Hughes. The former art critic of Time magazine gives us a guided tour through the city of Rome, excavating its bloody past and deconstructing its artistic masterpieces even as he creates an indelible portrait of a city that still stands today as “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error.” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35)
THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: NINE STORIES by Don DeLillo. This collection of short fiction, written between 1979 and 2011, offers telling insights into the author’s fascination with the chaotic margins of contemporary life. The title story, featuring two nuns who work in the desolate South Bronx, is a small miracle of storytelling in itself. (Scribner, $24)
THE TALIBAN SHUFFLE: STRANGE DAYS IN AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN by Kim Barker. In recounting her adventures as a reporter in one of the most dangerous regions of the world, the author captures both the serious and the seriously absurd conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, using black humor to convey the sad-awful-frequently-insane incongruities of war. (Doubleday, $25.95)
THE PALE KING by David Foster Wallace. Pieced together from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, this sprawling novel, set largely at an Internal Revenue Service office in the Midwest, depicts a nation plagued by tedium and meaningless bureaucracy. By turns brilliant and stupefying, maddening and elegiac, it’s a book that sheds new, retrospective light on Wallace’s hallucinatory vision of America. (Little, Brown & Company, $27.99)
THE TIGER’S WIFE by Téa Obreht. In creating a portrait of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war, this stunning debut novel moves seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary colored world of fable, exploring the role that storytelling plays in people’s lives when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval. (Random House, $25)
BLUE NIGHTS by Joan Didion. An elliptical yet searing inquiry into loss, this devastating memoir traces the author’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her daughter Quintana Roo — who died in 2005 at age 39 — and to understand Quintana’s life. Moving back and forth between recent painful memories and bright family snapshots from the past, the book becomes a melancholy meditation on mortality and time. (Alfred A. Knopf, $25)
THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach. This accomplished first novel is not only a baseball classic — right up there in the pantheon with “The Natural” by Bernard Malamud — but it’s also an affecting story about friendship and coming of age, tracing the intertwined lives of five engaging characters at a small college near Lake Michigan. (Little, Brown & Company, $25.99)
BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD by Michael Lewis. Using his uncommon ability to make virtually any subject interesting, the author takes us on a surreal trip through some of the countries hardest hit by the 2008 fiscal tsunami — including Greece, Iceland and Ireland — and in doing so, makes understanding today’s headlines about European sovereign debt both fascinating and lucid. (W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95)
100 Notable Books of 2011FICTION & POETRY
November 21, 2011
100 Notable Books of 2011FICTION & POETRY
THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories.By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $24.) DeLillo’s first collection of short fiction, compiling stories written between 1979 and 2011, serves as a liberating reminder that terror existed long before there was a war on it.
THE ART OF FIELDING. By Chad Harbach. (Little, Brown, $25.99.) This allusive, Franzen-like first novel, about a gifted but vulnerable baseball player, proceeds with a handsome stateliness.
THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES. By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A big, insightful novel about social and ethnic conflict in contemporary Los Angeles.
BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway? Written and illustrated by Anders Brekhus Nilsen. (Drawn & Quarterly, cloth, $69.95; paper, $44.95.) In this capacious, metaphysically inclined graphic novel, a flock of finches act out Nilsen’s unsettling comic vision about the food chain, fate and death.
THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC. By Julie Otsuka. (Knopf, $22.) Through a chorus of narrators, Otsuka unfurls the stories of Japanese women who came to America in the early 1900s to marry men they’d never met.
CANTI. By Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Jonathan Galassi. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) With this English translation, Leopardi may at last become as important to American literature as Rilke or Baudelaire.
THE CAT’S TABLE. By Michael Ondaatje. (Knopf, $26.) Ondaatje grants that this novel, about three daring Ceylonese schoolboys on a sea journey to England, sometimes uses the “coloring and locations of memoir.”
CHANGÓ’S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES. By William Kennedy. (Viking, $26.95.) In Kennedy’s most musical work of fiction, a newspaperman attains a cynical old-pro objectivity as Albany’s political machine pulls out the stops to head off a race riot in 1968.
COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS. By Matthew Zapruder. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) Much of the poetry here, displaying a consistent stillness and confidence, is the strongest of Zapruder’s career.
11/22/63. By Stephen King. (Scribner, $35.) A meditation on memory, loss, free will and necessity, King’s novel sends a teacher back to 1958 by way of a time portal in a Maine diner. His assignment is to stop Lee Harvey Oswald — but first he must make sure of Oswald’s guilt.
THE FREE WORLD. By David Bezmozgis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Bezmozgis overturns clichéd expectations of immigrant idealism in his first novel, which follows a Soviet Jewish family awaiting visas in Rome in 1978.
GHOST LIGHTS. By Lydia Millet. (Norton, $24.95.) Millet sends an I.R.S. agent on a mission to a Central American jungle, providing a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken.
THE GRIEF OF OTHERS. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Complex but fundamentally decent characters hurt one another and are hurt by forces greater than themselves, as a family sinks beneath the weight of a terrible secret.
GRYPHON: New and Selected Stories. By Charles Baxter. (Pantheon, $27.95.) Beneath the shadowless Norman Rockwell contours of Baxter’s Midwest lurks a chilling starkness and sense of isolation reminiscent of the bleakly beautiful work of Edward Hopper.
HOUSE OF HOLES: A Book of Raunch. By Nicholson Baker. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Hilarious and extremely dirty, this episodic assortment of fantasies — part Plato’s Retreat, part Fantasy Island — celebrates desire, frailty and the comedy of life.
THE LAST WEREWOLF. By Glen Duncan. (Knopf, $25.95.) A wry, world-weary and hyper-articulate werewolf, morally as well as physically ambiguous, is tortured by the spirits of his victims and ready to surrender to his pursuers.
THE LEFTOVERS. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.) In this novelistic version of the biblical prophecy known as the Rapture, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims as well as Christians mysteriously disappear.
LIFE ON MARS. By Tracy K. Smith. (Graywolf, paper, $15.) Smith’s impressive range is on full display in her third poetry collection, in which she mourns her father, who worked on the Hubble Telescope.
THE LONDON TRAIN. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s artfully constructed, socially realistic novel is split between two characters who react in opposite ways to their old affair.
LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories. By Barry Hannah. (Grove, $27.50.) Hannah, who died last year, had a refined eye for the outrageous; this collection shows he retained full command of his powers to the end of his life.
LOST MEMORY OF SKIN. By Russell Banks. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) This novel, about a paroled sex offender, bravely tries to find humanity in people whom society often despises.
THE MARRIAGE PLOT. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Eugenides adeptly renders the patter of college intellectuals and the sweet banter of courtship, and is particularly astute on the uncertainties awaiting after graduation.
A MOMENT IN THE SUN. By John Sayles. (McSweeney’s, $29.) Sayles’s reimagining of America at the turn of the last century nods to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon.
MR. FOX. By Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $25.95.) This playful tale is presented in the alternating voices of a slasher novelist, his wife and his muse, the last of whom urges the writer to embrace intimacy over violence and death.
MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $25.99.) Prose’s sardonic novel of a young Albanian immigrant in New Jersey sets America in high relief, mordant and comic, light and dark.
1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. (Knopf, $30.50.) This voluminous novel, set in 1984, is simultaneously a mystery, a love story and a dystopian fantasy that raises questions of psychology and ethics.
OPEN CITY. By Teju Cole. (Random House, $25.) The peripatetic hero of Cole’s indelible novel reflects on his adopted New York, the Africa of his youth, today’s America and a Europe wary of its future.
THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand parable of “late capitalism,” set in the innards of the Internal Revenue Service.
PARALLEL STORIES. By Peter Nadas. Translated by Imre Goldstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) This nearly 1,200-page novel opens in 1989 and is centered, roughly, on a Budapest apartment building whose residents have been trapped in the torpor of Communist tyranny.
SAY HER NAME. By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $24.) Goldman’s passionate, moving narrative takes as its subject his tragically short marriage to the writer Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing accident in 2007, when she was 30.
SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE. By Amos Oz. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.) In these powerful linked stories of longing and disappointment, Oz returns to a spare, almost allegorical style.
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $25.) In this Booker Prize winner, an unexpected bequest forces a man to re-evaluate his relationships, present and past.
SEVEN YEARS. By Peter Stamm. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Other Press, paper, $15.95.) Stamm’s protagonist, an aspiring architect in 1980s Germany, wanders between his charming, frigid wife and plain but devoted mistress.
SHARDS. By Ismet Prcic (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.99.) The Bosnian hero of Prcic’s absorbing and unsettling first novel is shattered by war.
SPACE, IN CHAINS. By Laura Kasischke. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) What may be the most ambitious, and disturbing, of Kasischke’s eight books of poems strives to comprehend first and last things.
STONE ARABIA. By Dana Spiotta. (Scribner, $24.) A faded heroine struggles with the loss of her brother, an unrecognized rock star, in this acerbic and deeply sad narrative.
THE STRANGER’S CHILD. By Alan Hollinghurst. (Knopf, $27.95.) Hollinghurst’s sharply drawn novel tells the story of relatives and scholars grappling with the legacy of a Rupert Brooke-like poet killed during World War I.
THE SUBMISSION. By Amy Waldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This resonant and darkly comic novel, by a former New York Times journalist, imagines an uproar over a proposed Sept. 11 memorial.
SWAMPLANDIA! By Karen Russell. (Knopf, $24.95.) Russell’s exuberant first novel, an expansion of her story “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” concerns the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing theme park in the Everglades.
TALLER WHEN PRONE: Poems. By Les Murray. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Viscerally smoldering anger, the signature quality of Murray’s poetry, turns conventional pieties inside out.
TEN THOUSAND SAINTS. By Eleanor Henderson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE. By Helen Schulman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99.) A family’s Manhattan life comes apart when their 15-year-old forwards a sexually explicit video made for him, unsolicited, by a girl two years younger.
THE TIGER’S WIFE. By Téa Obreht. (Random House, $25.) In her first novel, Obreht uses fable and allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing the region’s patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence.
THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR. By Arthur Phillips. (Random House, $26.) Phillips’s splendidly devious novel consists of a Shakespearean play of his own virtuosic creation and an “introduction” that devastatingly reveals the psychological life of its author.
TRAIN DREAMS. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) The taming of the American West is encompassed in Johnson’s novella, whose orphaned hero is sent by train in the 1890s into the woods of the Idaho panhandle.
NONFICTION
AND SO IT GOES. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. By Charles J. Shields. (Holt, $30.) From Dresden to his mother’s suicide, the early death of a beloved sister, serial unhappy marriages and literary anxiety, Vonnegut earned his status as Man of Sorrows, as this diligent and often heartbreaking biography shows.
ARGUABLY: Essays. By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $30.) Hitchens’s esophageal cancer inevitably throws a shadow over this spirited, provocative, prodigiously witty collection.
THE ART OF CRUELTY: A Reckoning. By Maggie Nelson. (Norton, $24.95.) Nelson examines representations of violence in the media, largely aiming her laments high up the cultural ladder — at the fine arts, literature, theater and even poetry.
ASSASSINS OF THE TURQUOISE PALACE. By Roya Hakakian. (Grove, $25.) In gripping style, Hakakian recounts the 1992 killings of four Iranian opposition members in Berlin, which ultimately implicated the top levels of Iran’s leadership.
THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY: Explanations That Transform the World. By David Deutsch. (Viking, $30.) Deutsch’s inexhaustibly curious exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge pivots on the European Enlightenment.
BELIEVING IS SEEING: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. By Errol Morris. (Penguin Press, $40.) The filmmaker is chiefly interested here in the nature of knowledge, in figuring out where the truth lies.
THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. (Viking, $40.) Are humans essentially good or bad? Has the past century seen moral progress or moral collapse? Pinker addresses these questions and more.
BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. By Gabrielle Hamilton. (Random House, $26.) This memoir by the chef at the Manhattan restaurant Prune is a story of hungers specific and vague.
BLUE NIGHTS. By Joan Didion. (Knopf, $25.) Mourning the 2005 death of her daughter, Didion presents herself as defenseless against the pain of loss in this elegantly written memoir.
THE BOY IN THE MOON: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son. By Ian Brown. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The truth Brown learns from his severely disabled child is a rare one: the life that seems to destroy you is the one you long to embrace.
CARAVAGGIO: A Life Sacred and Profane. By Andrew Graham-Dixon. (Norton, $39.95.) Caravaggio’s painting was deeply affected by the squalor, violence and energy of Roman street life.
CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman. By Robert K. Massie. (Random House, $35.) Massie provides a sweeping narrative about the impressive minor German princess who became empress of Russia.
CLARENCE DARROW: Attorney for the Damned. By John A. Farrell. (Doubleday, $32.50.) In this biography, Darrow’s unsavory side is on view, from his personal callousness to his purchasing of testimony.
COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS. By Alexandra Fuller. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Fuller’s mother is the star of this funny and affecting memoir, a companion to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”
DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. By Candice Millard. (Doubleday, $28.95.) A deranged man shot James Garfield, but it was his incompetent doctors who killed him.
THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: Nonfictions, Etc. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Lethem’s extraliterary enthusiasms are all over this hefty collection, which includes essays on film, comics, music, Brooklyn and, of course, fiction.
1861: The Civil War Awakening. By Adam Goodheart. (Knopf, $28.95.) In this account of the war’s first stage, Goodheart turns his lens upon fascinating figures who loomed large at the time but have now been mostly forgotten.
EXAMINED LIVES: From Socrates to Nietzsche. By James Miller. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Miller shows philosophers becoming ever more inclined to reflect on their own petty failings, and suggests this makes their lives more, not less, worth studying.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. By Charles C. Mann. (Knopf, $30.50.) This follow-up to “1491” argues that ecological encounters since Columbus have shaped much of subsequent human history.
GEORGE F. KENNAN: An American Life. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Penguin Press, $39.95.) Gaddis has written a magisterial biography of the man who both invented the cold war policy of containment and was one of its most perspicacious critics.
GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India. By Joseph Lelyveld. (Knopf, $28.95.) While many of Gandhi’s aspirations (a Muslim-Hindu alliance, a full end to untouchability) remain largely unfulfilled, it is his role as a social reformer that most interests Lelyveld.
HARLEM IS NOWHERE: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A Harlem transplant documents her own and others’ experiences there, working not to define the neighborhood, but to revise received ideas.
HOLY WAR: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations. By Nigel Cliff. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) The Portuguese explorer hoped to find Christians in India and enlist them in an alliance against Islam.
IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. By Erik Larson. (Crown, $26.) The experiences of the ambassador William E. Dodd and his lusty daughter, Martha.
INFERNO: The World at War, 1939-1945. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $35.) Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him in a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho attitude to war fills the pages of so many military histories.
THE INFORMATION: A History. A Theory. A Flood. By James Gleick. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Gleick argues that information is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers: human consciousness, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.
INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. By Janet Reitman. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) Reitman has rendered the most complete picture of Scientology so far.
IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. By David Bellos. (Faber & Faber, $27.) Against the orthodox view that a translation can’t substitute for the original, a scholar argues that the two need not be the same, but only similar.
JERUSALEM: The Biography. By Simon Sebag Montefiore. (Knopf, $35.) Three thousand years, packed with telling detail, in the life of the holy city.
THE KEATS BROTHERS: The Life of John and George. By Denise Gigante. (Belknap/Harvard University, $35.) A Stanford professor’s clever pairing of the lives of the poet Keats and his brother, who emigrated to the American backcountry.
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. By Lisa Randall. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $29.99.) A Harvard professor meditates on the nature of science and where physics is headed.
MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention. By Manning Marable. (Viking, $30.) This careful biography presents a more complete and unvarnished version of its subject’s life than the one found in “The Autobiography.”
THE MEMORY CHALET. By Tony Judt. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Before Judt died last year of a disease that left him clearheaded but immobile, he dictated these vivid autobiographical sketches, the best of which recall life in his native England.
MIDNIGHT RISING: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. By Tony Horwitz. (Holt, $29.) One of America’s most troubling historical figures is the subject of Horwitz’s deft narrative.
MOBY-DUCK: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. By Donovan Hohn. (Viking, $27.95.) Where those rubber toys came from, where they drifted, and why.
MY SONG: A Memoir. By Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson. (Knopf, $30.50.) The international calypso star, actor and mainstay of the civil rights movement recalls his life.
THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. (PublicAffairs, $27.95.) In this challenging and often contrarian book, Morozov explores how the Internet is used to constrict or even abolish political freedom.
ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE: A Memoir. By Binyavanga Wainaina. (Graywolf, $24.) The author describes fiction as his refuge from the confusing realities of politics and adolescence in his native Kenya.
THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) What countries are capable of “getting to Denmark”? Fukuyama’s answer emphasizes the role of contingency.
PAULINE KAEL: A Life in the Dark. By Brian Kellow. (Viking, $27.95.) Kellow’s is a fair-minded and deeply reported biography of the provocative and maddening writer whose essays about movies transformed American pop-culture criticism.
PULPHEAD. By John Jeremiah Sullivan. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) These thrumming, intelligent magazine essays highlight Sullivan’s interest in the rare cultural nexus where genuine artistry intersects with commercial popularity.
THE QUEST: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. By Daniel Yergin. (Penguin Press, $37.95.) This comprehensive study makes clear that energy policy is not on the right course anywhere.
RIGHTS GONE WRONG: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality. By Richard Thompson Ford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The Stanford professor argues that the progressive left and the colorblind right are guilty of the same error: defining discrimination too abstractly and condemning it too categorically, with similarly perverse results.
RIN TIN TIN: The Life and the Legend. By Susan Orlean. (Simon & Schuster, $26.99.) How the soulful German shepherd, born on a World War I battlefield, conquered Hollywood and became a familyfriendly symbol of cold war gunslinging.
[SIC]: A Memoir. By Joshua Cody. (Norton, $24.95.) A young composer’s account of his cancer sidesteps the issue of sentimentality by mocking it, in prose bright and jazzy and meandering.
THE STORM OF WAR: A New History of the Second World War. By Andrew Roberts. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) In a clear, accessible account of the war in all its theaters, Roberts asks how the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, wound up losing.
THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern. By Stephen Greenblatt. (Norton, $26.95.) The legacy of the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Renaissance book hunter who saved his great poem from oblivion.
THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. By Daniel Kahneman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel in economic science in 2002, presents a lucid and profound vision of flawed human reason in a book full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.
TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET. By Colin Thubron. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99.) Weighed down by grief after the death of his mother, the author makes a pilgrimage to Mount Kailas, venerated by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and others.
TO END ALL WARS: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. By Adam Hochschild. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) This stirring account concentrates on the appalling losses in the ranks and on the courage of those who decided the war in Europe was not a just one.
A TRAIN IN WINTER: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. By Caroline Moorehead. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Moorehead meticulously traces the fates of 230 Frenchwomen sent to Auschwitz as political prisoners of the Reich.
VAN GOGH: The Life. By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. (Random House, $40.) Was Van Gogh a high-I.Q. aesthete or an earnest simpleton? A frugal bohemian or a big spender? A man who took his own life or a man who was murdered? This hulking and energetic biography complicates the picture.
WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS? What It Means to Be Black Now. By Touré. (Free Press, $25.) The author’s interviews with 105 prominent African-Americans suggest that today’s “black identity” has cleared the way to a liberating pursuit of individuality.
WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A Stanford historian argues that we face an immediate choice — East-West cooperation or catastrophe.
A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. By Amanda Foreman. (Random House, $35.) While Union and Confederate guns blazed, a battle was also being waged for English hearts and minds, at both the elite and popular levels.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 22, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the death of the author Barry Hannah. He died in March 2010, not 2011.
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100 Notable Books of 2011FICTION & POETRY
THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories.By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $24.) DeLillo’s first collection of short fiction, compiling stories written between 1979 and 2011, serves as a liberating reminder that terror existed long before there was a war on it.
THE ART OF FIELDING. By Chad Harbach. (Little, Brown, $25.99.) This allusive, Franzen-like first novel, about a gifted but vulnerable baseball player, proceeds with a handsome stateliness.
THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES. By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A big, insightful novel about social and ethnic conflict in contemporary Los Angeles.
BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway? Written and illustrated by Anders Brekhus Nilsen. (Drawn & Quarterly, cloth, $69.95; paper, $44.95.) In this capacious, metaphysically inclined graphic novel, a flock of finches act out Nilsen’s unsettling comic vision about the food chain, fate and death.
THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC. By Julie Otsuka. (Knopf, $22.) Through a chorus of narrators, Otsuka unfurls the stories of Japanese women who came to America in the early 1900s to marry men they’d never met.
CANTI. By Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Jonathan Galassi. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) With this English translation, Leopardi may at last become as important to American literature as Rilke or Baudelaire.
THE CAT’S TABLE. By Michael Ondaatje. (Knopf, $26.) Ondaatje grants that this novel, about three daring Ceylonese schoolboys on a sea journey to England, sometimes uses the “coloring and locations of memoir.”
CHANGÓ’S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES. By William Kennedy. (Viking, $26.95.) In Kennedy’s most musical work of fiction, a newspaperman attains a cynical old-pro objectivity as Albany’s political machine pulls out the stops to head off a race riot in 1968.
COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS. By Matthew Zapruder. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) Much of the poetry here, displaying a consistent stillness and confidence, is the strongest of Zapruder’s career.
11/22/63. By Stephen King. (Scribner, $35.) A meditation on memory, loss, free will and necessity, King’s novel sends a teacher back to 1958 by way of a time portal in a Maine diner. His assignment is to stop Lee Harvey Oswald — but first he must make sure of Oswald’s guilt.
THE FREE WORLD. By David Bezmozgis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Bezmozgis overturns clichéd expectations of immigrant idealism in his first novel, which follows a Soviet Jewish family awaiting visas in Rome in 1978.
GHOST LIGHTS. By Lydia Millet. (Norton, $24.95.) Millet sends an I.R.S. agent on a mission to a Central American jungle, providing a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken.
THE GRIEF OF OTHERS. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Complex but fundamentally decent characters hurt one another and are hurt by forces greater than themselves, as a family sinks beneath the weight of a terrible secret.
GRYPHON: New and Selected Stories. By Charles Baxter. (Pantheon, $27.95.) Beneath the shadowless Norman Rockwell contours of Baxter’s Midwest lurks a chilling starkness and sense of isolation reminiscent of the bleakly beautiful work of Edward Hopper.
HOUSE OF HOLES: A Book of Raunch. By Nicholson Baker. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Hilarious and extremely dirty, this episodic assortment of fantasies — part Plato’s Retreat, part Fantasy Island — celebrates desire, frailty and the comedy of life.
THE LAST WEREWOLF. By Glen Duncan. (Knopf, $25.95.) A wry, world-weary and hyper-articulate werewolf, morally as well as physically ambiguous, is tortured by the spirits of his victims and ready to surrender to his pursuers.
THE LEFTOVERS. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.) In this novelistic version of the biblical prophecy known as the Rapture, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims as well as Christians mysteriously disappear.
LIFE ON MARS. By Tracy K. Smith. (Graywolf, paper, $15.) Smith’s impressive range is on full display in her third poetry collection, in which she mourns her father, who worked on the Hubble Telescope.
THE LONDON TRAIN. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s artfully constructed, socially realistic novel is split between two characters who react in opposite ways to their old affair.
LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories. By Barry Hannah. (Grove, $27.50.) Hannah, who died last year, had a refined eye for the outrageous; this collection shows he retained full command of his powers to the end of his life.
LOST MEMORY OF SKIN. By Russell Banks. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) This novel, about a paroled sex offender, bravely tries to find humanity in people whom society often despises.
THE MARRIAGE PLOT. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Eugenides adeptly renders the patter of college intellectuals and the sweet banter of courtship, and is particularly astute on the uncertainties awaiting after graduation.
A MOMENT IN THE SUN. By John Sayles. (McSweeney’s, $29.) Sayles’s reimagining of America at the turn of the last century nods to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon.
MR. FOX. By Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $25.95.) This playful tale is presented in the alternating voices of a slasher novelist, his wife and his muse, the last of whom urges the writer to embrace intimacy over violence and death.
MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $25.99.) Prose’s sardonic novel of a young Albanian immigrant in New Jersey sets America in high relief, mordant and comic, light and dark.
1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. (Knopf, $30.50.) This voluminous novel, set in 1984, is simultaneously a mystery, a love story and a dystopian fantasy that raises questions of psychology and ethics.
OPEN CITY. By Teju Cole. (Random House, $25.) The peripatetic hero of Cole’s indelible novel reflects on his adopted New York, the Africa of his youth, today’s America and a Europe wary of its future.
THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand parable of “late capitalism,” set in the innards of the Internal Revenue Service.
PARALLEL STORIES. By Peter Nadas. Translated by Imre Goldstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) This nearly 1,200-page novel opens in 1989 and is centered, roughly, on a Budapest apartment building whose residents have been trapped in the torpor of Communist tyranny.
SAY HER NAME. By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $24.) Goldman’s passionate, moving narrative takes as its subject his tragically short marriage to the writer Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing accident in 2007, when she was 30.
SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE. By Amos Oz. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.) In these powerful linked stories of longing and disappointment, Oz returns to a spare, almost allegorical style.
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $25.) In this Booker Prize winner, an unexpected bequest forces a man to re-evaluate his relationships, present and past.
SEVEN YEARS. By Peter Stamm. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Other Press, paper, $15.95.) Stamm’s protagonist, an aspiring architect in 1980s Germany, wanders between his charming, frigid wife and plain but devoted mistress.
SHARDS. By Ismet Prcic (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.99.) The Bosnian hero of Prcic’s absorbing and unsettling first novel is shattered by war.
SPACE, IN CHAINS. By Laura Kasischke. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) What may be the most ambitious, and disturbing, of Kasischke’s eight books of poems strives to comprehend first and last things.
STONE ARABIA. By Dana Spiotta. (Scribner, $24.) A faded heroine struggles with the loss of her brother, an unrecognized rock star, in this acerbic and deeply sad narrative.
THE STRANGER’S CHILD. By Alan Hollinghurst. (Knopf, $27.95.) Hollinghurst’s sharply drawn novel tells the story of relatives and scholars grappling with the legacy of a Rupert Brooke-like poet killed during World War I.
THE SUBMISSION. By Amy Waldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This resonant and darkly comic novel, by a former New York Times journalist, imagines an uproar over a proposed Sept. 11 memorial.
SWAMPLANDIA! By Karen Russell. (Knopf, $24.95.) Russell’s exuberant first novel, an expansion of her story “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” concerns the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing theme park in the Everglades.
TALLER WHEN PRONE: Poems. By Les Murray. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Viscerally smoldering anger, the signature quality of Murray’s poetry, turns conventional pieties inside out.
TEN THOUSAND SAINTS. By Eleanor Henderson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE. By Helen Schulman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99.) A family’s Manhattan life comes apart when their 15-year-old forwards a sexually explicit video made for him, unsolicited, by a girl two years younger.
THE TIGER’S WIFE. By Téa Obreht. (Random House, $25.) In her first novel, Obreht uses fable and allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing the region’s patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence.
THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR. By Arthur Phillips. (Random House, $26.) Phillips’s splendidly devious novel consists of a Shakespearean play of his own virtuosic creation and an “introduction” that devastatingly reveals the psychological life of its author.
TRAIN DREAMS. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) The taming of the American West is encompassed in Johnson’s novella, whose orphaned hero is sent by train in the 1890s into the woods of the Idaho panhandle.
NONFICTION
AND SO IT GOES. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. By Charles J. Shields. (Holt, $30.) From Dresden to his mother’s suicide, the early death of a beloved sister, serial unhappy marriages and literary anxiety, Vonnegut earned his status as Man of Sorrows, as this diligent and often heartbreaking biography shows.
ARGUABLY: Essays. By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $30.) Hitchens’s esophageal cancer inevitably throws a shadow over this spirited, provocative, prodigiously witty collection.
THE ART OF CRUELTY: A Reckoning. By Maggie Nelson. (Norton, $24.95.) Nelson examines representations of violence in the media, largely aiming her laments high up the cultural ladder — at the fine arts, literature, theater and even poetry.
ASSASSINS OF THE TURQUOISE PALACE. By Roya Hakakian. (Grove, $25.) In gripping style, Hakakian recounts the 1992 killings of four Iranian opposition members in Berlin, which ultimately implicated the top levels of Iran’s leadership.
THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY: Explanations That Transform the World. By David Deutsch. (Viking, $30.) Deutsch’s inexhaustibly curious exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge pivots on the European Enlightenment.
BELIEVING IS SEEING: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. By Errol Morris. (Penguin Press, $40.) The filmmaker is chiefly interested here in the nature of knowledge, in figuring out where the truth lies.
THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. (Viking, $40.) Are humans essentially good or bad? Has the past century seen moral progress or moral collapse? Pinker addresses these questions and more.
BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. By Gabrielle Hamilton. (Random House, $26.) This memoir by the chef at the Manhattan restaurant Prune is a story of hungers specific and vague.
BLUE NIGHTS. By Joan Didion. (Knopf, $25.) Mourning the 2005 death of her daughter, Didion presents herself as defenseless against the pain of loss in this elegantly written memoir.
THE BOY IN THE MOON: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son. By Ian Brown. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The truth Brown learns from his severely disabled child is a rare one: the life that seems to destroy you is the one you long to embrace.
CARAVAGGIO: A Life Sacred and Profane. By Andrew Graham-Dixon. (Norton, $39.95.) Caravaggio’s painting was deeply affected by the squalor, violence and energy of Roman street life.
CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman. By Robert K. Massie. (Random House, $35.) Massie provides a sweeping narrative about the impressive minor German princess who became empress of Russia.
CLARENCE DARROW: Attorney for the Damned. By John A. Farrell. (Doubleday, $32.50.) In this biography, Darrow’s unsavory side is on view, from his personal callousness to his purchasing of testimony.
COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS. By Alexandra Fuller. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Fuller’s mother is the star of this funny and affecting memoir, a companion to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”
DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. By Candice Millard. (Doubleday, $28.95.) A deranged man shot James Garfield, but it was his incompetent doctors who killed him.
THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: Nonfictions, Etc. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Lethem’s extraliterary enthusiasms are all over this hefty collection, which includes essays on film, comics, music, Brooklyn and, of course, fiction.
1861: The Civil War Awakening. By Adam Goodheart. (Knopf, $28.95.) In this account of the war’s first stage, Goodheart turns his lens upon fascinating figures who loomed large at the time but have now been mostly forgotten.
EXAMINED LIVES: From Socrates to Nietzsche. By James Miller. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Miller shows philosophers becoming ever more inclined to reflect on their own petty failings, and suggests this makes their lives more, not less, worth studying.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. By Charles C. Mann. (Knopf, $30.50.) This follow-up to “1491” argues that ecological encounters since Columbus have shaped much of subsequent human history.
GEORGE F. KENNAN: An American Life. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Penguin Press, $39.95.) Gaddis has written a magisterial biography of the man who both invented the cold war policy of containment and was one of its most perspicacious critics.
GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India. By Joseph Lelyveld. (Knopf, $28.95.) While many of Gandhi’s aspirations (a Muslim-Hindu alliance, a full end to untouchability) remain largely unfulfilled, it is his role as a social reformer that most interests Lelyveld.
HARLEM IS NOWHERE: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A Harlem transplant documents her own and others’ experiences there, working not to define the neighborhood, but to revise received ideas.
HOLY WAR: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations. By Nigel Cliff. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) The Portuguese explorer hoped to find Christians in India and enlist them in an alliance against Islam.
IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. By Erik Larson. (Crown, $26.) The experiences of the ambassador William E. Dodd and his lusty daughter, Martha.
INFERNO: The World at War, 1939-1945. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $35.) Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him in a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho attitude to war fills the pages of so many military histories.
THE INFORMATION: A History. A Theory. A Flood. By James Gleick. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Gleick argues that information is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers: human consciousness, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.
INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. By Janet Reitman. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) Reitman has rendered the most complete picture of Scientology so far.
IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. By David Bellos. (Faber & Faber, $27.) Against the orthodox view that a translation can’t substitute for the original, a scholar argues that the two need not be the same, but only similar.
JERUSALEM: The Biography. By Simon Sebag Montefiore. (Knopf, $35.) Three thousand years, packed with telling detail, in the life of the holy city.
THE KEATS BROTHERS: The Life of John and George. By Denise Gigante. (Belknap/Harvard University, $35.) A Stanford professor’s clever pairing of the lives of the poet Keats and his brother, who emigrated to the American backcountry.
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. By Lisa Randall. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $29.99.) A Harvard professor meditates on the nature of science and where physics is headed.
MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention. By Manning Marable. (Viking, $30.) This careful biography presents a more complete and unvarnished version of its subject’s life than the one found in “The Autobiography.”
THE MEMORY CHALET. By Tony Judt. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Before Judt died last year of a disease that left him clearheaded but immobile, he dictated these vivid autobiographical sketches, the best of which recall life in his native England.
MIDNIGHT RISING: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. By Tony Horwitz. (Holt, $29.) One of America’s most troubling historical figures is the subject of Horwitz’s deft narrative.
MOBY-DUCK: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. By Donovan Hohn. (Viking, $27.95.) Where those rubber toys came from, where they drifted, and why.
MY SONG: A Memoir. By Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson. (Knopf, $30.50.) The international calypso star, actor and mainstay of the civil rights movement recalls his life.
THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. (PublicAffairs, $27.95.) In this challenging and often contrarian book, Morozov explores how the Internet is used to constrict or even abolish political freedom.
ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE: A Memoir. By Binyavanga Wainaina. (Graywolf, $24.) The author describes fiction as his refuge from the confusing realities of politics and adolescence in his native Kenya.
THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) What countries are capable of “getting to Denmark”? Fukuyama’s answer emphasizes the role of contingency.
PAULINE KAEL: A Life in the Dark. By Brian Kellow. (Viking, $27.95.) Kellow’s is a fair-minded and deeply reported biography of the provocative and maddening writer whose essays about movies transformed American pop-culture criticism.
PULPHEAD. By John Jeremiah Sullivan. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) These thrumming, intelligent magazine essays highlight Sullivan’s interest in the rare cultural nexus where genuine artistry intersects with commercial popularity.
THE QUEST: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. By Daniel Yergin. (Penguin Press, $37.95.) This comprehensive study makes clear that energy policy is not on the right course anywhere.
RIGHTS GONE WRONG: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality. By Richard Thompson Ford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The Stanford professor argues that the progressive left and the colorblind right are guilty of the same error: defining discrimination too abstractly and condemning it too categorically, with similarly perverse results.
RIN TIN TIN: The Life and the Legend. By Susan Orlean. (Simon & Schuster, $26.99.) How the soulful German shepherd, born on a World War I battlefield, conquered Hollywood and became a familyfriendly symbol of cold war gunslinging.
[SIC]: A Memoir. By Joshua Cody. (Norton, $24.95.) A young composer’s account of his cancer sidesteps the issue of sentimentality by mocking it, in prose bright and jazzy and meandering.
THE STORM OF WAR: A New History of the Second World War. By Andrew Roberts. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) In a clear, accessible account of the war in all its theaters, Roberts asks how the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, wound up losing.
THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern. By Stephen Greenblatt. (Norton, $26.95.) The legacy of the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Renaissance book hunter who saved his great poem from oblivion.
THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. By Daniel Kahneman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel in economic science in 2002, presents a lucid and profound vision of flawed human reason in a book full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.
TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET. By Colin Thubron. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99.) Weighed down by grief after the death of his mother, the author makes a pilgrimage to Mount Kailas, venerated by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and others.
TO END ALL WARS: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. By Adam Hochschild. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) This stirring account concentrates on the appalling losses in the ranks and on the courage of those who decided the war in Europe was not a just one.
A TRAIN IN WINTER: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. By Caroline Moorehead. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Moorehead meticulously traces the fates of 230 Frenchwomen sent to Auschwitz as political prisoners of the Reich.
VAN GOGH: The Life. By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. (Random House, $40.) Was Van Gogh a high-I.Q. aesthete or an earnest simpleton? A frugal bohemian or a big spender? A man who took his own life or a man who was murdered? This hulking and energetic biography complicates the picture.
WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS? What It Means to Be Black Now. By Touré. (Free Press, $25.) The author’s interviews with 105 prominent African-Americans suggest that today’s “black identity” has cleared the way to a liberating pursuit of individuality.
WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A Stanford historian argues that we face an immediate choice — East-West cooperation or catastrophe.
A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. By Amanda Foreman. (Random House, $35.) While Union and Confederate guns blazed, a battle was also being waged for English hearts and minds, at both the elite and popular levels.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 22, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the death of the author Barry Hannah. He died in March 2010, not 2011.
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The 10 Best Books of 2011
The 10 Best Books of 2011
THE ART OF FIELDING
By Chad Harbach. Little, Brown & Company, $25.99.
At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach’s expansive, allusive first novel combines the pleasures of an old-fashioned baseball story with a stately, self-reflective meditation on talent and the limits of ambition, played out on a field where every hesitation is amplified and every error judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience.
11/22/63
By Stephen King. Scribner, $35.
Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to blend the ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal in a Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and — rewardingly for readers — also allows King to reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself.
SWAMPLANDIA!
By Karen Russell. Alfred A. Knopf, cloth, $24.95; Vintage Contemporaries, paper, $14.95.
An alligator theme park, a ghost lover, a Styx-like journey through an Everglades mangrove jungle: Russell’s first novel, about a girl’s bold effort to preserve her grieving family’s way of life, is suffused with humor and gothic whimsy. But the real wonders here are the author’s exuberantly inventive language and her vivid portrait of a heroine who is wise beyond her years.
TEN THOUSAND SAINTS
By Eleanor Henderson. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, $26.99.
Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel, her first, follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. By delving deeply into the lives of her characters, tracing their long relationships not only to one another but also to various substances, Henderson catches something of the dark, apocalyptic quality of the ’80s.
THE TIGER’S WIFE
By Téa Obreht. Random House, cloth, $25; paper, $15.
As war returns to the Balkans, a young doctor inflects her grandfather’s folk tales with stories of her own coming of age, creating a vibrant collage of historical testimony that has neither date nor dateline. Obreht, who was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age of 7, has recreated, with startling immediacy and presence, a conflict she herself did not experience.
NONFICTION
ARGUABLY
Essays.
By Christopher Hitchens. Twelve, $30.
Our intellectual omnivore’s latest collection could be his last (he’s dying of esophageal cancer). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.
THE BOY IN THE MOON
A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son.
By Ian Brown. St. Martin’s Press, $24.99.
A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Brown combines a reporter’s curiosity with a novelist’s instinctive feel for the unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained and unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.
MALCOLM X
A Life of Reinvention.
By Manning Marable. Viking, $30.
From petty criminal to drug user to prisoner to minister to separatist to humanist to martyr. Marable, who worked for more than a decade on the book and died earlier this year, offers a more complete and unvarnished portrait of Malcolm X than the one found in his autobiography. The story remains inspiring.
THINKING, FAST AND SLOW
By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.
We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy. In this comprehensive presentation of a life’s work, the world’s most influential psychologist demonstrates that irrationality is in our bones, and we are not necessarily the worse for it.
A WORLD ON FIRE
Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.
By Amanda Foreman. Random House, $35.
Which side would Great Britain support during the Civil War? Foreman gives us an enormous cast of characters and a wealth of vivid description in her lavish examination of a second battle between North and South, the trans-Atlantic one waged for British hearts and minds.
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