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All Stars 2006 - 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).

• The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs
  Author: Albright, Madeline with Bob Woodward
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060892579 Date: 2006
  LJ PW Booklist
  The former secretary of state offers a provocative and very personal look at the role of religion in America's foreign policy. She argues that understanding the place and power of religion--and knowing how best to respond to it--is essential if America is to lead successfully around the world.
  Updated 5.15.06
• Let Me Finish
  Author: Angell, Roger
  Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151013500 Date: 2006
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  Intimate, funny, and moving portraits form this book's centerpiece as Angell remembers his eccentric relatives, his childhood love of baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during his long career as a "New Yorker" writer and editor.
  Suggested Reading: Sports Stars
  Updated 3.6.06
• The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Or Religious Traditions
  Author: Armstrong, Karen
  Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375413170 Date: 2006
  Booklist PW LJ
  From one of the world's leading writers on religion and the highly acclaimed author of the bestselling A History of God comes a major new work: a chronicle of the ninth century BCE, when the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity into the present day.
  Updated 4.3.06
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
  Author: Bechdel, Alison
  Publisher: Houghton $ 19.95 ISBN: 0618477942 Date: 2006
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the
  unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten
  Burroughs and Mary Karr. It"s a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly
  illustrated with Bechdel"s sweetly gothic drawings and--like Marjane
  Satrapi"s Persepolis--a story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic
  memoir form. - Publisher Marketing
  Suggested Reading: Graphic Novels & Comic Stars
  Updated 3.16.06
• Flaubert: A Biography
  Author: Brown, Frederick
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 35 ISBN: 0316118788 Date: 2006
  LJ Kirkus PW Booklist
  From the highly acclaimed author of Zola: A Life comes the definitive biography of Gustave Flaubert on the 150th anniversary of Madame Bovary's publication.
  Suggested Reading: Authors
  Updated 3.17.06
• Orson Welles: Hello Americans
  Author: Callow, Simon
  Publisher: Viking $ 32.95 ISBN: 0670872563 Date: 2006
  PW Booklist Kirkus LJ
  In this volume of his masterful, highly acclaimed biography, Callow captures the genius of Orson Welles, revealing a life even more extraordinary than the myths that have surrounded it.
  Suggested Reading: Authors
  Updated 7.17.06
• House of War: The Pentagon, a History of Unbridled Power
  Author: Carroll, James
  Publisher: Houghton $ 30 ISBN: 0618187804 Date: 2006
  Kirkus LJ PW
  This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the Pentagon, the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more.
  Updated 4.10.06
• Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change
  Author: Flannery, Tim
  Publisher: Atlantic $ 25 ISBN: 0871139359 Date: 2006
  Kirkus PW LJ
  Both an urgent warning and a call to arms, The Weather Makers outlines the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what people can do to prevent a cataclysmic future.
  Suggested Reading: Weather
  Updated 11.23.05
• Watching the World Change
  Author: Friend, David
  Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374299331 Date: 2006
  Kirkus PW LJ
  In this collection, Friend tells the unforgettable stories behind the haunting yet defining images of the September 11th terrorist attacks and shows how advances in television, digital photography, and the Internet produced an effect whereby more than two billion people saw that day's terrible events as they happened.
  Suggested Reading: 9/11
  Updated 7.11.06
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
  Author: Gilbert, Elizabeth
  Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670034711 Date: 2006
  PW LJ Booklist
  A celebrated writer pens an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
  Updated 1.21.06
• The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise
  Author: Grunwald, Michael
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26 ISBN: 0743251059 Date: 2006
  PW Booklist Kirkus
  A prize-winning "Washington Post" reporter tells the story of the Florida Everglades, from its beginnings as 4,500 off-putting square miles of natural liquid wasteland to the ecological mess it has become.
  Suggested Reading: Nature
  Updated 2.8.06
• Death in Belmont
  Author: Junger, Sebastian
  Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393059804 Date: 2006
  PW Kirkus LJ
  In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. This spare, powerful narrative chronicles three lives that collide--and ultimately are destroyed--in the vortex of one of the first and most controversial serial murder cases in America.
  Suggested Reading: True Crime
  Updated 4.3.06
• The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell
  Author: Kurlansky, Mark
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 23.95 ISBN: 0345476387 Date: 2006
  PW Kirkus LJ
  From the bestselling author of Salt and Cod comes the fascinating history of the oyster's influence on four centuries of cultural, economic, and culinary trends--with recipes throughout.
  Suggested Reading: Cooked Books
  Updated 1.31.06
• Thunderstruck
  Author: Larson, Erik
  Publisher: Crown $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400080665 Date: 2006
  LJ Booklist PW
  The bestselling author of The Devil in the White City tells the amazing, interwoven stories of two men--Hawley Crippen, a doctor and an unlikely murderer, and Gugliemo Marconi, the obsessive genius who invented the wireless--whose stories converge during the greatest criminal chase of all time.
  Updated 8.10.06
• Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
  Author: Lewis, Michael
  Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 039306123x Date: 2006
  Booklist PW LJ
  The bestselling author of Coach, Moneyball and Liar's Poker delivers a multidimensional story that traces the upbringing of a young boy through to young adulthood, all through the lens of sports and his community of support.
  Updated 10.16.06
• Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero
  Author: Maraniss, David
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26 ISBN: 0743217810 Date: 2006
  PW LJ Kirkus
  From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of When Pride Still Mattered comes a book destined to become a modern classic--a full-scale biography of great baseball player and humanitarian Roberto Clemente, who lived, played, and died with enduring passion and grace.
  Suggested Reading: Sports Stars
  Updated 3.8.06
• All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone
  Author: MacPherson, Myra
  Publisher: Scribner $ 35 ISBN: 0684807130 Date: 2006
  Kirkus LJ PW Booklist
  Boasting equal parts scholarship and style, this is a groundbreaking and timely portrait of I.F. Stone, one of the 20th century's most independent and revered American journalists.
  Updated 9.18.06
• My Battle of Algiers
  Author: Morgan, Ted
  Publisher: Harper $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060852240 Date: 2006
  PW Kirkus LJ
  An eminent historian and Pulitzer Prize winner describes his experience as a young officer in the savage Algerian War. The author, a Yale graduate who grew up in France and America, was drafted into the French Army and served in Algeria from 1956-57.
  Updated 1.18.06
• Mayflower: An American Beginning
  Author: Philbrick, Nathaniel
  Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670037605 Date: 2006
  PW Booklist LJ Kirkus
  The startling story of the Plymouth Colony--from the flight to religious freedom to the war that ravaged New England--is told by the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the National Book Award.
  Updated 4.24.06
• The Shakespeare Wars: The Battle to Explain the Bard
  Author: Rosenbaum, Ron
  Publisher: Random $ 35 ISBN: 0375503390 Date: 2006
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  Rosenbaum's provocative and illuminating encounters with scholars and directors gives readers new ways of thinking about Shakespeare.
  Suggested Reading: Shakespeare
  Updated 9.18.06
• James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
  Author: Phillips, Julie
  Publisher: St Martins $ 27.95 ISBN: 0312203853 Date: 2006
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  Tiptree burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s with a series of hard-edged, provocative short stories. Then the cover was blown: the author was actually a 61-year-old woman named Alice Sheldon--world traveler, debutante, chicken farmer, CIA agent, and experimental psychologist. This fascinating biography is based on full access to her papers.
  Suggested Reading: Authors
  Updated 7.11.06
• Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis
  Author: Stargardt, Nicholas
  Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 1400040884 Date: 2006
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  This text breaks new ground in its exploration of the lives and fate of the children of all nationalities under the Nazi regime.
  Suggested Reading: Nazis
  Updated 11.14.05
• The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
  Author: Tolan, Sandy
  Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1582343438 Date: 2006
  Kirkus PW Booklist LJ
  Based on a 43-minute radio documentary that Tolan produced for "Fresh Air," this volume pursues the story into the homes and histories of the two families at its center through the present day. Their stories form a personal microcosm of the last 70 years of Israeli-Palestinian history.
  Updated 5.4.06
• Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
  Author: Trussoni, Danielle
  Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805077324 Date: 2006
  Kirkus Booklist LJ
  Danielle Trussoni unflinchingly explores a daughter's love for her flawed father and confronts the demons that haunt them both. Falling Through the Earth is tender and tough, harrowing and triumphant. - Jeanette Walls, author of The Glass Castle.
  Suggested Reading: Memoirs
  Updated 1.26.06
• The Looming Tower: Al Queda and the Road to 9/11
  Author: Wright, Lawrence
  Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 037541486x Date: 2006
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  This sweeping narrative history of 9/11 includes important new information about the people, ideas, events, and intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks, told for the first time from both the American and Arab sides of the story.
  Suggested Reading: 9/11
  Updated 8.16.06