All Stars 2004 - Nonfiction

Nonfiction titles which received three or more starred reviews (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist (BL), Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus, and Library Journal (LJ).

• An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
  Author: Ackerman, Diane
  Publisher: Scribner $ 25 ISBN: 0743246721
  LJ Booklist PW
  From the bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses "comes a playful, rewarding jaunt through the brain's chemical realities and emotional intangibles" (Kirkus Reviews).
  Updated 6.1.04
• The Fall of Baghdad
  Author: Anderson, Jon Lee
  Publisher: Penguin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594200343 Date: 2004
  PW Kirkus LJ
  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
• Alexander Hamilton
  Author: Chernow, Ron
  Publisher: Penguin $ 35 ISBN: 1594200092 Date: 2005
  Kirkus LJ Booklist
  From National Book Award winner Ron Chernow comes a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.
  Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars
  Updated 6.9.05
• Blue Blood
  Author: Conlon, Edward
  Publisher: Riverhead $ 26.95 ISBN: 1573222666
  Kirkus Booklist PW LJ
  With brio and a thrilling literary style, Conlon depicts his life on the force--from his first days walking a beat in the South Bronx to his ascent to detective. The pace is relentless, the stories hypnotic, the scope nothing less than grand.
  Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
  Updated 3.29.04
• The Ancestors's Tale: A Pilgrimage To the Dawn of Evolution
  Author: Dawkins, Richard
  Publisher: Houghton $ 28 ISBN: 0618005838 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  Renowned biologist and thinker Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments to his own provocative views, and loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
  Updated 10.19.04
• Washington's Crossing
  Author: Fischer, David Hackett
  Publisher: Oxford $ 35 ISBN: 0195170342 Date: 2004
  Booklist Kirkus PW
  In a dramatic and colorful narrative of a pivotal moment in American history, we see how the campaign developed in a web of hard choices by many actors on both sides of the Delaware.
  Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars
  Updated 2.5.04
• Earth, an Intimate History
  Author: Fortey, Richard A.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375406263 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist LJ
  The face of the earth, crisscrossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds, has changed and changed again over billions of years. This text shows how human culture and natural history--even the shape of cities--are rooted in this deep geological past.
  Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 11.22.04
• The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
  Author: Gingerich, Owen
  Publisher: Walker $ 25 ISBN: 0802714153
  PW Booklist LJ
  Part biography of Nicolaus Copernicus, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic quest, Gingerich's book will offer new appreciation of the history of science and cosmology.
  Updated 3.15.04
• The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters With Strangers
  Author: Hansen, Eric
  Publisher: Pantheon $ 24 ISBN: 0375421262 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  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
• Broadway: The American Musical
  Author: Kantor, Michael
  Publisher: Bulfinch $ 60 ISBN: 0821229052 Date: 2004
  Booklist LJ PW
  Along with jazz and abstract expressionism, the Broadway musical is one of the few uniquely American art forms. This companion to the six-part PBS documentary series is a colorful and fascinating exploration of how Americans define the Broadway musical and how the musical defines Americans. Compelling, in-depth text is complemented by lavish illustrations, including photographs, sheet-music covers, caricatures, and more.
  Updated 11.2.04
• The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America
  Author: Morgan, Edmund S.
  Publisher: Norton $ 26.95 ISBN: 0393059200 Date: 2004
  PW Kirkus LJ
  Dividing his work into 24 essays with sections on "New Englanders," "Southerners," and "Revolutionaries," Morgan examines the history of the American colonies from the arrival of the first settlers in 1607 to the radical changes brought forth by the American Revolution.
  Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars
  Updated 4.8.04
• Geronimo's Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me
  Author: Nasdijj
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345453913
  PW LJ Booklist
  Geronimo's Bones is a powerful and intimate account of the love between brothers, from the acclaimed author of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams and The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping.
  Updated 2.13.04
• Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
  Author: Patchett, Ann
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0060572140 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist Library Journal
  Tender but brutal, this portrait of unwavering commitment shines light on the little explored world of women's friendships through the author's relationship with critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.
  Suggested Reading: Nonfiction That Reads Like Fiction | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 5.20.04
• Audubon: The Making of an American
  Author: Rhodes, Richard
  Publisher: Knopf $ 28.95 ISBN: 0375414126 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist LJ
  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
  Updated 9.22.04
• Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
  Author: Sullivan, Robert
  Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 23.95 ISBN: 1582343853
  Kirkus PW LJ
  Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting. The author of A Whale Hunt now turns the lowly rat into the star of the most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant book of the season.
  Suggested Reading: Nature
  Updated 2.2.04
• Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir
  Author: Tucker, Neely
  Publisher: Crown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0609609769
  PW Booklist LJ
  In the heart of conflict-torn Zimbabwe, an American couple fights to save the life of--and ultimately adopt--an infant girl who had been abandoned beneath an acacia tree on the day she was born.
  Updated 1.15.04
• Borges
  Author: Williamson, Edwin
  Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670885797 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist LJ
  Based on an unprecedented range of interviews and new research, this is the first biography to encompass the entire life of short story writer, essayist, and poet Jorge Luis Borges, who revolutionized Latin American literature.
  Updated 8.16.04