October 2004

Nonfiction

• The Fall of Baghdad
  Author: Anderson, Jon Lee
  Publisher: Penguin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594200343 Date: 2004
  PW KirkusLJ
  In channeling a tragedy of epic dimensions through the stories of real people caught up in the whirlwind of history, Anderson has written a book of timeless significance.
  Updated 10.7.04
• Twelve Little Cakes
  Author: Dery, Dominka
  Publisher: Riverhead $ 24.95 ISBN: 1573222836 Date: 2004
  KirkusLJ
  Equal parts testimony to the struggle of a bygone era and a love letter to a joy-filled childhood that no external forces could dim, The Twelve Little Cakes is the colorful story of a precocious child born to recognized dissidents associated with the failed Prague Spring uprising.
  Updated 9.20.04
• The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters With Strangers
  Author: Hansen, Eric
  Publisher: Pantheon $ 24 ISBN: 0375421262 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWBooklist
  Eric Hansen is an intrepid traveler with a keenly perceptive eye and an appreciation for the odd and unusual. He will go anywhere and try anything. Through it all he manages to capture the most revealing conversations and the most transporting moments in his travels, from the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Borneo and far beyond.
  
  Hansen writes about the mind-altering experience of drinking kava in Vanuatu and about heartrending moments working at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. He joins a grieving husband searching for his dead wife’s wedding ring at a crash site in the Borneo rain forest. He recounts his miraculous survival of Cyclone Tracy on a fishing boat off the north coast of Australia, and he befriends an elderly Russian woman who would prepare catered dinners for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky in her tiny Manhattan kitchen while drug dealers were shot to death in the downstairs lobby. He spends time with an ornithologist who studies endangered ants and the sex lives of banana slugs—and takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions.
  
  Each essay is a passionate experience of life refracted through the eyes and voice of a singularly evocative and original writer. - Publisher Marketing.
  
  Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
  Updated 9.22.04
• Audubon: The Making of an American
  Author: Rhodes, Richard
  Publisher: Knopf $ 28.95 ISBN: 0375414126 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWBooklistLJ
  From the Pulitzer Prize—winning historian Richard Rhodes, the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.
  
  Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English girl next door, crossing the Appalachians to frontier Kentucky to start a new life, fashioning himself into an American just as his adopted country was finding its identity.
  
  Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds–pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies–and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images. Now he finds his calling: to take his hundreds of watercolor drawings to England to be engraved in a great multivolume work called The Birds of America. Within weeks of his arrival there in 1826, he achieves remarkable celebrity as “the American Woodsman.” He publishes his major work as well as five volumes of bird biographies enhanced by his authentic descriptions of pioneer American life.
  
  Audubon’s story is an artist’s story but also a moving love story. In his day, communications by letter across the ocean were so slow and uncertain that John James and his wife, Lucy, almost lost each other in the three years when the Atlantic separated them–until he crossed the Atlantic and half the American continent to claim her. Their letters during this time are intimate, moving, and painful, and they attest to an enduring love.
  
  We examine Audubon’s legacy of inspired observation–the sonorities of a wilderness now lost, the brash life of a new nation just inventing itself–precisely, truthfully, lyrically captured. And we see Audubon in the fullness of his years, made rich by his magnificent work, winning public honor: embraced by writers and scientists, fêted by presidents and royalty.
  
  Here is a revelation of Audubon as the major American artist he is. And here he emerges for the first time in his full humanity–handsome, charming, volatile, ambitious, loving, canny, immensely energetic. Richard Rhodes has given us an indispensable portrait of a true American icon. - Publisher Marketing
  Suggested Reading: Nature Stars
  Updated 9.22.04

Fiction

• The Darling
  Author: Banks, Russell
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060197358 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWBooklist
  Raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence, and the clash of races and cultures, this political/historical thriller is Russell Banks at his best.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 8.12.04
• Before You Know Kindness
  Author: Bohjalian, Christopher
  Publisher: Crown $ 25 ISBN: 1400047455 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  For ten summers, the extended Seton family met at their country home in New Hampshire to spend a week together playing tennis and badminton and golf, and drinking gin and tonics on the homestead porch to celebrate the end of the season. But during the 11th summer, everything changes after a terrible accident.
  Updated 8.13.04
• Red Queen: A Transcultural Tragicomedy
  Author: Drabble, Margaret
  Publisher: Harcourt $ 24 ISBN: 0151011060 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWLJBooklist
  Prior to her impending trip to Seoul, Barbara Halliwell receives a memoir of a Korean crown princess, written more than 200 years ago. But from whom? The story she avidly reads turns out to be one of great intrigue as well as tragedy.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 9.20.04
• Shantaram
  Author: Roberts, Gregory
  Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312330529 Date: 2004
  KirkusPW
  Based directly upon the experiences of its author, Shantaram is the story of a man who escapes from a maximum security in Australia to arrive in Bombay, the crossroads of the underworld, where he works in a first-aid station and smuggles drugs and guns.
  Updated 8.2304


• Northern Lights
  Author: Roberts, Nora
  Publisher: Putnam $ 25.95 ISBN: 0399152059 Date: 2004
  KirkusPW
  Lunacy was Nate Burke's last chance. As a Baltimore cop, he'd watched his partner die on the street--and the guilt still haunts him. With nowhere else to go, he accepts the job as Chief of Police in this tiny, remote Alaskan town, where he unearths the secrets and suspicions that lurk beneath Lunacy's placid surface. And his discovery will threaten the new life--and the new love--that he has finally found for himself.
  Updated 9.6.04
• The Plot Against America
  Author: Roth, Philip
  Publisher: Houghton $ 26 ISBN: 0618509283 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWBooklistLJ
  In this alternate history, Pulitzer Prize-winner Roth considers what it would be like for his Newark family--and for a million such families all over the country--during the menacing years of a Charles Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews would have every reason to expect the worst.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars | Alternative History
  Updated 9.22.04
• System of the World
  Author: Stephenson, Neal
  Publisher: Morrow $ 27.95 ISBN: 0060523875 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWLJ
  New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson pens the final volume in his hugely ambitious and compelling epic of intrigue, adventure, and excitement, filled with a remarkable cast of characters in a time of genius, discovery, and change.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars
  Updated 9.22.04

Mystery & Suspense

• The Murder Artist
  Author: Case, John
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 25.95 ISBN: 0345464710 Date: 2004
  KirkusPW
  A TV reporter sets out on a coast-to-coast quest against time to save his twin sons in this novel by the Hammett Prize-nominated author of the Eighth Day.
  Updated 9.20.04
• A Watery Grave
  Author: Druett, Joan
  Publisher: Minotaur $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312334419 Date: 2004
  LJBooklist
  "A vivid, immediate setting and an original hero highlight this first mystery by historian Joan Druett, who brings her knowledge of 19th-century sailing ships and Maori culture to this salty tale of murder at sea."--Dana Stabenow, author of A Grave Denied.
  Suggested Reading: Sea Stories | Debuts
  Updated 9.7.04
• Good Morning, Midnight
  Author: Hill, Reginald
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060528079 Date: 2004
  KirkusPWLJ
  The "sorcerer of style" ( New York Times Book Review) is at the top of his form in this suspenseful story of a mysterious death that echoes one in the past.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 9.20.04
• The Surrogate Thief
  Author: Mayor, Archer
  Publisher: Mysterious $ 24.95 ISBN: 089296815x Date: 2004
  KirkusPW
  The latest installment in the classic Joe Gunther series finds the Vermont detective on his most personal and dangerous case yet.
  Updated 9.18.04
• Bahamarama
  Author: Morris, Bob
  Publisher: Minotaur $ 21.95 ISBN: 0312328893 Date: 2004
  LJ
  As unpredictable as island trade winds, Bahamarama twists and turns its wayto a stunning conclusion and announces the arrival of a writer who is sure to surprise and delight mystery fans for years to come.
  Updated 9.20.04
• Absent Friends
  Author: Rozan, S.J.
  Publisher: Delacorte $ 24 ISBN: 0385338031 Date: 2004
  PWBooklistLJ
  The secrets of a group of childhood friends unravel in this haunting thriller by Edgar Award winner S.J. Rozan. Set in New York in the unforgettable aftermath of September 11, Absent Friends brilliantly captures a time and place unlike any other.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 9.22.04
• Dying To Call You: A Dead End Job Mystery
  Author: Viets, Elaine
  Publisher: Signet $ 6.50 (paper) ISBN: 0451213327 Date: 2004
  While making the best of her telemarketing job, Helen Hawthorne thinks she hears a murder on the other end of the line and must avoid a close call with a killer.
  Updated 9.24.04
  
• Killer Chameleon
  Author: West, Chassie
  Publisher: Harper $ 6.50 (paper) ISBN: 0060548428 Date: 2004
  In the fourth novel of West's stunning series, former D.C. cop Leigh Anne Warren must face a lethal adversary with a grudge who's determined to make Leigh Anne pay--and keep paying.
  Updated 9.24.04
  

Books for Kids, Teens & Readers of All Ages

• The Star of the Kazan
  Author: Ibbotson, Eva
  Publisher: Dutton $ 16.99 ISBN: 0525473475 Date: 2004
  KirkusSLJBooklist
  Set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, this novel tells the story of a young servant girl who learns she is, in fact, an aristocrat whose true home is an ancient castle. But at the crumbling castle, young Annika discovers that all is not as it seems in the lives of her newfound family.
  Grades: 4-7 Category: Fiction | Mystery & Suspense | Historical Fiction