CVCO - Overbooked: Nonfiction Stars 2004

Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .

Starred Reviews

Nonfiction Stars - 2004

April 2, 2008

Nonfiction Stars of 2004 - A selected list of titles.

This reading list is based on personal preferences. It reflects interests in nonfiction that reads like good fiction, history, science, nature, travel, biography, memoirs and a few assorted odd topics. An emphasis is placed on nonfiction that reads like good fiction. Titles are listed by approximate date of publication, then alphabetically by author.

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine - unless otherwise noted.

December

Hope in Hell: The World of Doctors Without Borders
Author: Bortolotti, Dan
Publisher: Firefly $ 29.95 ISBN: 1552978656 Date: 2004
Booklist
Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, delivers emergency aid around the world. This book tells its history and examines the lives of individual volunteers. Topics range from emergency surgery in war zones to witnessing atrocities.
Suggested Reading: Medical Nonfiction Stars
Updated 10.4.04
Orphans: Essays
Author: D'Ambrosio, Charles
Publisher: Clear Cut $ 12.95 ISBN: 0972324357 Date: 2004
PW
Updated 11.22.04
Bound To Please
Author: Dirda, Michael
Publisher: Norton $ 35 ISBN: 0393057577 Date: 2004
Kirkus
This new work features scores of Dirda's most engaging essays, all intended to introduce readers to wonderful writers, from the anecdotal Herodotus and James Boswell to the sensuous Colette and Steven Millhauser and European masters including Joseph Roth, Flann O'Brien, and Penelope Fitzgerald.
Updated 11.4.04
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction
Author: Gutkind, Lee (ed)
Publisher: Norton $ 15.95 (paper) ISBN: 0393326659 Date: 2004
Booklist
Gutkind collects 25 examples of narrative nonfiction--liberated journalism that invites writers to dramatize, interpret, speculate, and even re-create their subjects--all originally published in "Creative Nonfiction," the journal that he founded in 1994.
Updated 11.29.04
Downtown: My Manhattan
Author: Hamill, Pete
Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316734519 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
More than just history or reporting, this is an elegy by a native son who haslived through some of New York's most historic moments, and continues to callthis magnificent, haunted city his home.
Updated 11.15.04
The Queen's Slave Trader: Jack Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls
Author: Hazlewood, Nick
Publisher: Morrow $ 26.95 ISBN: 0066210895 Date: 2004
PW
In the 17th and 18th centuries, England became the greatest slave trading nation in the world. This painstakingly researched biography of Jack Hawkyns, the queen's personal slave trader, explores his life and chronicles the rise of the English slave trade.
Suggested Reading: Queen Elizabeth I
Updated 10.25.04
The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married
Author: Kehoe, Elizabeth
Publisher: Atlantic $ 27.50 ISBN: 0871139243 Date: 2004
LJ
The author pens a family saga chronicling the glamorous lives of Leonard Jerome, his daughters, and their children through the apogee and the twilight of the British Empire. Daughter Jennie married Randolph Churchill and was Winston's mother. Daughter Clara was romanced by the dashing Moreton Frewen, while daughter Leonie married into the Leslies, a distinguished Irish family.
Suggested Reading: Sisters
Updated 12.27.04
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Author: McGee, Harold
Publisher: Scribner $ 35 ISBN: 0684800012 Date: 2004
PW
The revised and updated twentieth anniversary edition of the classic On Food And Cooking features 90 percent new material, addressing the culinary mechanics, mysteries, and trends of the past 20 years. Compulsively readable and engaging, this updated volume covers every aspect of how food is grown, harvested, cooked, eaten, and digested.
Suggested Reading: Cooked Books
Updated 11.22.04
Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Racing Legend
Author: Seymour, Miranda
Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400061687 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
Drawn from a remarkable cache of newly discovered papers, this work sheds new light on both the treacherous world of international racing and life in Occupied France, while revealing the story of Hell Nice, a fearless and passionate woman who lived for the challenge of becoming the fastest woman in the world.
Suggested Reading: Driven Stars | Women's History Stars
Updated 11.29.04
The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad
Author: Willentz, Sean and Greil Marcus (ed)
Publisher: Norton $ 26.95 ISBN: 0393059545 Date: 2004
Booklist
Wilentz and Marcus have assembled an astonishing group of writers and artists--more than a dozen novelists, essayists, performers, and critics--to explore the ineffable power of the American ballad in words and in drawings.
Suggested Reading: Music - Nonfiction Stars
Updated 11.29.04

November

The Heart of the World: A Journey To the Last Great Place
Author: Baker, Ian
Publisher: Penguin $ 27.95 ISBN: 1594200270 Date: 2004
PW
One of the most captivating stories of exploration and discovery in recent memory, The Heart of the World is an extraordinary journey to one of the wildest and most inaccessible places on Earth--and a pilgrimage to the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist faith.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales | Tibet
Updated 10.19.04
My Life With Bonnie & Clyde
Author: Barrow, Blanche Caldwell
Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma $ 29.95 ISBN: 0806136251 Date: 2004
LJ
Blanche Barrow's previously unknown memoir of her life on the run with Bonnie and Clyde.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 11.2.04
Zara's Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa
Author: Beard, Peter H.
Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 0679426590 Date: 2004
Booklist
Updated 10.25.04
Road Work: Among Tyrants, Beasts, Heroes and Rogues
Author: Bowden, Mark
Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 087113876x Date: 2004
Kirkus
Road Work collects Mark Bowden's award-winning nonfiction, from his breakout stories for "The Philadelphia Inquirer" to his most recent high-profile pieces in "The Atlantic." The stories are powerfully gripping, elucidating and often wryly humorous.
Updated 9.24.04
Magical Thinking: True Stories
Author: Burroughs, Augusten
Publisher: St Martins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312315945 Date: 2004
Booklist
From the #1 bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry comes an outrageous collection of true stories that confirms Augusten Burroughs' position as a top satirist and memoirist.
Updated 7.6.04
The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold
Author: Ehrlich, Gretel
Publisher: Pantheon $ 21.95 ISBN: 037542251x Date: 2004
BooklistLJ
Gretel Ehrlich is a woman who loves extremes--extreme weather; extreme cold--is exhilarated by the challenges they present, and is keenly alive to sensation and impression at every turn. In The Future of Ice, she travels to extreme points (from Tierra del Fuego to the top of the world) in her quest to understand the complex, primal nature of cold. - Publisher Marketing
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales | Nature Stars
Updated 11.22.04
Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age
Author: Essinger, James
Publisher: Oxford $ 28 ISBN: 0192805770 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Essinger tells the story of some of the most brilliant inventors the world has ever known, in this fascinating account of how a hand-loom invented in Napoleonic France led to the development of the modern information age.
Updated 8.25.04
Earth, an Intimate History
Author: Fortey, Richard A.
Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375406263 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklistLJ
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: All Stars | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 11.22.04
Time's Magpie: A Walk in Prague
Author: Goldberg, Myla
Publisher: Crown $ 16 ISBN: 1400046041 Date: 2004
LJ
Author Goldberg takes readers through the city's historic streets, some eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to Lunapark, home to bumper cars, go-carts, and a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and through Strahov Monastery, where the cabinets of curiosity display everything from butterfly specimens to a supposedly real jabberwocky.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 11.2.04
Hell or High Water: Seven Men, Seven Kayaks and the Last Great Quest
Author: Heller, Peter
Publisher: Rodale $ 24.95 ISBN: 1579548725 Date: 2004
PW
In this grand adventure, an elite kayaking team makes a heroic conquest of the world's last great adventure prize: Tibet's Tsangpo River. Publication coincides with the release of a documentary about the expedition by National Geographic.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales | Adult Books for Teens | Tibet
Updated 8.16.04
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45
Author: Hastings, Max
Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375414339 Date: 2004
LJ PW
The author has scoured the archives of the major combatants and interviewed many survivors to create an unprecedented understanding of the events and their impact for this rousing and revealing chronicle of the crucial final 18 months of the 20th-century's greatest global conflict, World War II.
Updated 12.27.04
13 Dreams Freud Never Had: The New Mind Science
Author: Hobson, J. Allan
Publisher: Pi $ 24.95 ISBN: 0131472259 Date: 2004
PW
From the author of The Dream Drugstore and Dreaming comes a new book which delves into the nature of psychoanalysis.
Updated 11.15.04
Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Frauds - American History From Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellisles, Ellis and Goodwiin
Author: Hoffer, Peter Charles
Publisher: Public Affairs $ 26 ISBN: 1586482440 Date: 2004
Kirkus
At a time when the writing of history has never been more contentious and its interpreters never more publicly at war, a renowned American historian provides an evocative examination of his profession.
Updated 11.4.04
Taste of the Sweet Apple: A Memoir
Author: Holt-Watson, Jo Anna
Publisher: Sarabande $ 14.95 ISBN: 1932511083 Date: 2004
Booklist
Updated 10.4.04
Men of Tomorrow
Author: Jones, Gerard
Publisher: Basic $ 26 ISBN: 0465036562 Date: 2004
Kirkus
This full-scale history of superhero comic books reveals how ambitious crooks and adolescent dreamers created a new art form and forever changed the entertainment business in America.
Suggested Reading: Graphic Novel and Comic Stars | Cartoonists Stars
Updated 8.25.04
Prisoner of the Vatican: The Pope's Sercret Plot to Capture Rome From the New Italian State
Author: Kertzer, David L.
Publisher: Houghton $ 26 ISBN: 0618224424 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Based on a wealth of documents long buried in the Vatican archives, Prisoner of the Vatican tells the story of the Church's secret attempt to block the unification of Italy and seize control--not in ancient times, but in the late 19th century.
Updated 9.6.04
Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained
Author: Kleinzahler, August
Publisher: FSG $ 18 ISBN: 0374133778 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Readers are taken on a wild journey by from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in "The London Review of Books," make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run.
Updated 8.25.04
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Author: Oz, Amos
Publisher: Harcourt $ 26 ISBN: 0151008787 Date: 2004
PW
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this family saga tells the the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 1940s and 50s and fifties. It is also a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.
Updated 11.15.04
Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour
Author: Persico, Joseph E.
Publisher: Random $ 29.95 ISBN: 0375508252 Date: 2004
LJKirkus
The author puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous as he follows ordinary soldiers' lives, illuminating their fate as the end of World War I approaches.
Updated 10.19.04
Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI
Author: Powers, Richard
Publisher: Free $ 30 ISBN: 0684833719 Date: 2004
BooklistPW
On the heels of 9/11, historian Powers shows how the FBI has arrived at a critical juncture and why its future has become gravely imperiled.
Updated 10.4.04
The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
Author: Reid, T.R.
Publisher: Penguin $ 25.95 ISBN: 1594200335 Date: 2004
Booklist
Reid lays bare the ways in which the EU is positioning itself to be a global counterweight and second superpower, on equal footing with the U.S.
Updated 10.4.04
Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater
Author: Richman, Alan
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 006058629x Date: 2004
Kirkus
From the ten-time James Beard Award winner and "GQ's" food critic comes a witty, globe-trotting smorgasbord of culinary escapades.
Suggested Reading: Cooked Books
Updated 8.25.04
Wanted Man: The Forgotten Story of an American Outlaw
Author: Spargo, Tamsin
Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 23.95 ISBN: 1582342288 Date: 2004
Booklist
In 1892, a masked man boarded the American Express Special train as it sped through New York State and stole a fortune. His name was Oliver Curtis Perry, and he instantly became the country's most wanted man and media darling. Spargo brings this extraordinary portrait of a forgotten man to life in a story of adventure and tragedy.
Updated 11.2.04
Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means
Author: Vollmann, William T.
Publisher: Ecco $ 29.95 ISBN: 0060548185 Date: 2004
PW
When is violence justified? This abridged version of Vollmann's 3,000-page, seven-volume opus is a meditation on this age-old conundrum.
Updated 11.2.04
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi
Author: Wilson, William Scott
Publisher: Kodansha $ 24 ISBN: 47702942x Date: 2004
Kirkus
Updated 8.25.04
We Are All the Same: The Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love
Author: Wooten, Jim
Publisher: Penguin $ 19.95 ISBN: 1594200289 Date: 2004
PWKirkus
We Are All the Same is a powerful testament to the strength of the human spirit, even as it bears witness to the scope of the tragedy that is unfolding in Africa and around the world, cutting down millions of children like Nkosi Johnson.
Suggested Reading: South Africa | AIDS
Updated 9.6.04
Nine Suitcases: A Memoir
Author: Zsolt, Bela
Publisher: Schocken $ 25 ISBN: 080524204x Date: 2004
Booklist
Originally published in Hungary in weekly installments starting in 1946, Nine Suitcases tells the harrowing story of Bela Zsolt's experiences in the ghetto and as a forced laborer in the Ukraine. It not only offers a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but also shockingly exposes the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice, and betrayal of which human beings--the victims no less than the perpetrators--are capable in extreme circumstances.- Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Memoirs
Updated 10.4.04

October

The Fall of Baghdad
Author: Anderson, Jon Lee
Publisher: Penguin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594200343 Date: 2004
PWKirkusLJ
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.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Iraq Stars
Updated 10.7.04
Where Will Wisdom Be Found?
Author: Bloom, Harold
Publisher: Riverhead $ 24.95 ISBN: 1573222844 Date: 2004
PW
In this inspiring book, a preeminent literary critic, takes readers from the Bible to 20th-century writing, searching for the ways in which literature can inform our lives.
Updated 8.30.04
Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy
Author: Bradford, Sarah
Publisher: Viking $ 27.95 ISBN: 0670033537 Date: 2004
Booklist
Drawing from a trove of contemporary documents and fascinating firsthand accounts, Bradford brings to life the art, the pageantry, and the dangerous politics of the Renaissance world Lucrezia Borgia helped to create.
Suggested Reading: Women's History Stars
Updated 11.2.04
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Author: Bragg, Melvyn
Publisher: Arcade $ 27.95 ISBN: 1559707100 Date: 2004
LJ
Bragg's landmark history of the English language details how and where it began 1,500 years ago, and how it evolved to become the tongue of two billion people worldwide.
Updated 11.2.04
Everyday Matters
Author: Campion, Nardi Reeder
Publisher: Univ Pr of New England $ 24.95 ISBN: 1584654074 Date: 2004
Kirkus
With her wit, insightful storytelling, and keen ear for offbeat anecdotes, Nardi Reeder Campion speaks for a generation that has traveled from the roaring twenties into the twenty-first century.
Updated 7.26.04
When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today
Author: Cox, Harvey
Publisher: Houghton $ 26 ISBN: 0618067442 Date: 2004
Booklist
Translating the method and message of the Rabbi of Nazareth into today's idiom, world-renowned theologian Harvey Cox reinvigorates the stories of Jesus as contemporary guides for leading a moral life. By looking to Jesus' parables, Cox shows how readers can extrapolate answers and bridge the gap between the ancient and modern worlds.
Updated 11.2.04
The Ancestors's Tale: A Pilgrimage To the Dawn of Evolution
Author: Dawkins, Richard
Publisher: Houghton $ 28 ISBN: 0618005838 Date: 2004
KirkusPWBooklist
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.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 10.19.04
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.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 9.20.04
Fried Chicken: An American Story
Author: Edge, John T.
Publisher: Putnam $ 18.95 ISBN: 0399151834 Date: 2004
LJ
Edge weaves a beguiling tapestry of food and culture as he takes readers from a Jersey Shore hotel to a Kansas City roadhouse, from the original Buffalo wings to KFC, from Nashville Hot Chicken to haute fried chicken at a genteel Southern inn. And, best of all, offers 15 of the ultimate recipes along the way.
Suggested Reading: Cooked Books
Updated 11.2.04
His Excellency: George Washington
Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 1400040310 Date: 2004
PWBooklist
The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With his careful attention to detail and his lyrical prose, Ellis has set a new standard for biography.

Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portrait of George Washington’s life and career–from his military years through his two terms as president. Ellis illuminates the difficulties the first executive confronted as he worked to keep the emerging country united in the face of adversarial factions. He richly details Washington’s private life and illustrates the ways in which it influenced his public persona. Through Ellis’s artful narration, we look inside Washington’s marriage and his subsequent entrance into the upper echelons of Virginia’s plantation society. We come to understand that it was by managing his own large debts to British merchants that he experienced firsthand the imperiousness of the British Empire. And we watch the evolution of his attitude toward slavery, which led to his emancipating his own slaves in his will. Throughout, Ellis peels back the layers of myth and uncovers for us Washington in the context of eighteenth-century America, allowing us to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments and the character of his spirit and mind.

When Washington died in 1799, Ellis tells us, he was eulogized as “first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Since then, however, his image has been chisled onto Mount Rushmore and printed on the dollar bill. He is on our landscape and in our wallets but not, Ellis argues, in our hearts. Ellis strips away the ivy and legend that have grown up over the Washington statue and recovers the flesh-and-blood man in all his passionate and fully human prowess.

In the pantheon of our republic’s founders, there were many outstanding individuals. And yet each of them–Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison– acknowledged Washington to be his superior, the only indispensable figure, the one and only “His Excellency.” Both physically and politically, Washington towered over his peers for reasons this book elucidates. His Excellency is a full, glorious, and multifaceted portrait of the man behind our country’s genesis, sure to become the authoritative biography of George Washington for many decades. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars
Updated 9.22.04
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
Author: Flynn, Nick
Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393051390 Date: 2004
LJ
In bold, dazzling prose, Flynn tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led him and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.
Suggested Reading: Memoir Stars
Updated 9.20.04
Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery
Author: Foster, Patrica
Publisher: Univ of Georgia $ 39.95/18.95 ISBN: 0820326828/0820326887 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Updated 7.26.04
Travelling With Che Guevara: The Making of A Revolutionary
Author: Granado, Alberto
Publisher: Newmarket $ 24.95/14.95 ISBN: 1557046409/1557046395 Date: 2004
LJ
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 9.20.04
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Author: Greenblatt, Stephen
Publisher: Norton $ 26.95 ISBN: 0393050572 Date: 2004
PW
Greenblatt interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. Readers see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world.
Suggested Reading: Shakespearean Stars
Updated 7.19.04
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 | All Stars
Updated 9.22.04
Hell or High Water: Seven Men, Seven Kayaks and the Last Great Quest
Author: Heller, Peter
Publisher: Rodale $ 24.95 ISBN: 1579548725 Date: 2004
PW
In this grand adventure, an elite kayaking team makes a heroic conquest of the world's last great adventure prize: Tibet's Tsangpo River. Publication coincides with the release of a documentary about the expedition by National Geographic.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales | Tibet
Updated 8.16.04
The Know-it-all: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Author: Jacobs, A.J.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 25 ISBN: 0743250605 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Alarmed and more than a little chagrined at the massive gaps in his personal knowledge base, Jacobs sets for himself a suitably daunting, and some might say insane, task: to fill in the holes in his Ivy-league education by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z.
Updated 7.26.04
The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France
Author: Jager, Eric
Publisher: Broadway $ 24.95 ISBN: 0767914163 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
Set during the Hundred Years War, this is the gripping, atmospheric true story of the "duel to end all duels" in medieval France: a trial by combat pitting a knight against a squire accused of violating the knight's beautiful young wife.
Updated 9.7.04
A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience
Author: Jones, Thai
Publisher: Free $ 26 ISBN: 0743250273 Date: 2004
Kirkus
In this elegant family history, journalist Thai Jones traces the past century of American radical politics through the extraordinary exploits of several generations of his own family.
Updated 7.26.04
Broadway: The American Musical
Author: Kantor, Michael
Publisher: Bulfinch $ 60 ISBN: 0821229052 Date: 2004
BooklistLJPW
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.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Music - Nonfiction Stars
Updated 11.2.04
Outwitting History: How One Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Civilization
Author: Lansky, Aaron
Publisher: Algonquin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1565124294 Date: 2004
KirkusLJ
The man who spearheaded what has been called "the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history" recounts his poignant, intrepid, and often riotous quest to safeguard a vanishing civilization.
Suggested Reading: Reading & Books Stars
Updated 11.2.04
Hip: The History
Author: Leland, John
Publisher: Ecco $ 26.95 ISBN: 0060528176 Date: 2004
LJ
Hip is the story of the evolution of American popular culture over the 20th century to its current position as the world's cultural touchstone.
Updated 9.20.04
Janet & Me
Author: Mack, Stan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 14 (paper) ISBN: 0684872781 Date: 2004
PWLJ
Featuring his trademark documentary cartooning style, acclaimed journalist-artist Stan Mack chronicles a poignant, unflinching, and intensely personal story of love and loss, and the remarkable relationship at the heart of it all. Illustrations throughout.
Suggested Reading: Graphic Novel Stars | Breast Cancer
Updated 11.3.04
A Reading Diary
Author: Manguel, Alberto
Publisher: FSG $ 20 ISBN: 0374247420 Date: 2004
PW
While traveling, Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world he was living in. He decided to keep a diary of these moments, reading a book a month and recording his observations, which provides an enthralling adventure in literature and life.
Suggested Reading: Reading & Books Stars
Updated 6.30.04
The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period
Author: Mehta, Ved
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth $ 22.95 ISBN: 1560256281 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
When, as a boy, Mehta finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother's shoulder during a New York dinner party, he begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father's past in the exotic, closed world of British India.
Suggested Reading: Stars of India
Updated 10.19.04
My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere
Author: Orlean, Susan
Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 0679462937 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Susan Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by The Washington Post and “a kind of latter-day Tocqueville” by The New York Times Book Review. In addition to having written classic articles for The New Yorker, she was played, with some creative liberties, by Meryl Streep in her Golden Globe Award—winning performance in the film Adaptation.

Now, in My Kind of Place, the real Susan Orlean takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois–and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality.

With Orlean as guide, lucky readers partake in all manner of armchair activity. They will climb Mt. Fuji and experience a hike most intrepid Japanese have never attempted; play ball with Cuba’s Little Leaguers, promising young athletes born in a country where baseball and politics are inextricably intertwined; trawl Icelandic waters with Keiko, everyone’s favorite whale as he tries to make it on his own; stay awhile in Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where oil time is the only time that matters; explore the halls of a New York City school so troubled it’s known as “Horror High”; and stalk caged tigers in Jackson, New Jersey, a suburban town with one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world.

Vivid, humorous, unconventional, and incomparably entertaining, Susan Orlean’s writings for The New Yorker have delighted readers for over a decade. My Kind of Place is an inimitable treat by one of America’s premier literary journalists. - Publisher Marketing
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 7.26.04
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: All Stars
Updated 9.22.04
Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer - America's Deadliest Serial Murderer
Author: Rule, Ann
Publisher: Free $ 26 ISBN: 0743238516 Date: 2004
PW
America's master of true crime presents her biggest book yet: the long-awaited story of the terrifying Green River killings, with more than 48 young women victims, and the "man next door" murderer who hid his horrific addiction for two decades.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 8.30.04
The Life of Graham Greene
Author: Sherry, Norman
Publisher: Viking $ 39.95 ISBN: 0670031429 Date: 2004
BooklistKirkus
Updated 11.2.04
Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger
Author: Slater, Nigel
Publisher: Gotham $ 25 ISBN: 1592400906 Date: 2004
KirkusLJ
Toast is Slater's extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. A bestseller and award-winner in the United Kingdom, Toast is sure to delight both foodies and memoir readers on this side of the pond.
Suggested Reading: Memoir Stars | Cooked Books
Updated 8.16.04
Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797
Author: Sugden, John
Publisher: Henry Holt $ 35 ISBN: 080507757x Date: 2004
BooklistPW
Historian Sugden has penned one of the most authoritative and captivating accounts ever written of legendary British naval commander Horatio Nelson's early career and rise to prominence.
Updated 11.2.04
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
Author: Turchi, Peter
Publisher: Trinity $ 24.95 ISBN: 159534005x Date: 2004
Booklist
Drawing on texts as varied as poetry, novels, and cartoons, Turchi explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work. Tracing the history of maps, he then relates what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.
Updated 10.4.04
Born Fighting: How the Scots- Irish Shaped America
Author: Webb, James
Publisher: Broadway $ 25.95 ISBN: 0767916883 Date: 2004
Booklist
Webb tells the epic story of the Scots-Irish, a people whose lives and worldview were dictated by resistance, conflict, and struggle, and who, in turn, profoundly influenced the social, political, and cultural landscape of America.
Updated 10.4.04
Greenpeace: How a Group of Journalists, Ecologists and Visionaries Changed the World
Author: Weyler, Rex
Publisher: Rodale $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594861064 Date: 2004
PWBooklist
Greenpeace founder and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Weyler has penned the first comprehensive eyewitness account of the human drama behind the creation of the world's largest direct-action environmental group.
Updated 10.25.04

September

The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It
Author: Angell, Marcia
Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 0375508465 Date: 2004
LJPW
During her two decades at "The New England Journal of Medicine", Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become - and argues for essential, long-overdue change. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Medical Nonfiction Stars
Updated 8.2.04
Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church
Author: Ault, James M.
Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 037540242x Date: 2004
Kirkus
In an attempt to understand the growing influence of the Christian Right, sociologist and documentary filmmaker Ault reports on the three years he spent inside the world of a Massachusetts fundamentalist church he encountered while studying a variety of new-right groups.
Updated 6.30.04
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
Author: Boyle, Kevin
Publisher: Holt $ 26 ISBN: 0805071458 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Boyle recounts the electrifying story of the sensational 1925 Ossian Sweet murder trial, an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times, a city divided, and the advent of the civil rights struggle in Detroit.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 8.2.04
When Corruption Was King: How I Helped the Mob Rule Chicago, Then Brought the Outfit Down
Author: Cooley, Robert & Hillel Levin
Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 26 ISBN: 0786713305 Date: 2004
Booklist
Former Chicago mob lawyer Cooley tells of living a double life in order to turn on his cronies and help the federal government take down America's most corrupt criminal justice system.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 10.4.04
Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes
Author: Craig, Emily A.
Publisher: Crown $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400049229 Date: 2004
Kirkus
A forensic anthropologist recounts her unlikely career, which has ranged from murder victims discovered in the backwoods of Appalachia to some of the highest-profile cases of our time.
Updated 6.30.04
Suggested Reading: CSI Stars - Crime Scene Investigations | Adult Books for Teens
The Stories of English
Author: Crystal, David
Publisher: Overlook $ 35 ISBN: 1585676012 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklsit
Crystal turns the history of the language on its head and provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies: in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the globe.
Updated 10.19.04
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest
Author: Earley, Lawrence
Publisher: Univ of NC $ 27.50 ISBN: 0807828866 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Longleaf pine once flourished across the South in park-like forests of astonishing beauty and diversity--the most extensive forest ecosystem in North America. Much of the region's history is connected to these trees, which were exploited for agriculture, pasturage, timber, and naval stores. Today longleaf pine forests are recognized as one of the world's most endangered ecosystems. This book blends human and natural history to reveal the compelling story of these magnificent trees and also addresses current conservation and restoration efforts.
Suggested Reading: Nature
Updated 6.10.04
All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians and Artists
Author: Gross, Terry
Publisher: Hyperion $ 24.95 ISBN: 1401300103 Date: 2004
Kirkus
For this collection, Gross has selected more than three dozen of her best interviews for NPR's Fresh Air--ones of lasting relevance that are as lively on the page as they were on the air.
Updated 6.30.04
The Cyanide Canary
Author: Hilldorfer, Joseph & Robert Dugoni
Publisher: Free $ 26 ISBN: 0743246527 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
In this true story of a horrific environmental crime, written by an EPA Special Agent, a brave young man suffers severe brain damage after being pulled from a poison-saturated 25,000-gallon storage tank.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens | True Crime Stars
Updated 6.30.04
The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World
Author: Hopkins, Roz (ed)
Publisher: Lonely Planet $ 39.99 ISBN: 1741044510 Date: 2004
LJ
From Lonely Planet's staff of travel experts comes a coffeetable book to inspire wanderlust in both novices and seasoned travelers. This ultimate travel pictorial delivers the world by featuring every country on the planet in gorgeous photographs and evocative descriptions.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 11.2.04
Bloodsworth: the True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA
Author: Junkin, Tim
Publisher: Algonquin $ ISBN: 1565124197 Date: 2004
LJ
A shocking, page-turner of a book that, as Scott Turow says, "may well be the most incredible and important true story ever written about a death row convict's daily battle for survival, both in the cell block and in the courtrooms."
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens | True Crime Stars
Updated 6.17.04
Maximum City: Bombay
Author: Mehta, Suketu
Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 0375403728 Date: 2004
PWLJ
A brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people-a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself-from an award-winning Indian-American fiction writer and journalist. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales | Stars of India
Updated 9.22.04
Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood
Author: Mintz, Steven
Publisher: Belknap $ 29.95 ISBN: 0674015088 Date: 2004
BooklistLJ
Like Huck's raft, the experience of American childhood has been both adventurous and terrifying. Mintz gives readers the first comprehensive history of American childhood, encompassing both the child's and the adult's tumultuous early years of life.
Updated 11.2.04
Osama: The Making of a Terrorist
Author: Randal, Jonathan C.
Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 0375409017 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
How is it possible for one middle-aged Saudi millionaire to threaten the world's only superpower? This is the question at the center of Jonathan Randal's riveting, timely account of Osama bin Laden's role in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Afghanistan Stars
Updated 6.30.04
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Author: Ralston, Aron
Publisher: Atria $ 26 ISBN: 0743492811 Date: 2004
Booklist
Icebound meets Into Thin Air in this astonishing, day-by-day account of Ralston's terrible accident, self-amputation, and subsequent rescue and recovery.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens | Rock Climbing
Updated 8.13.04
Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television
Author: Rosenberg, Howard
Publisher: Ivan Dee $ 26 ISBN: 1566635772 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Howard Rosenberg traces a disturbing pattern on American television, a relentless pursuit of the mundane in its seeming quest to dumb down America. Not So Prime Time records how this has happened-not overnight; the crud has been creeping forward for years.
Updated 6.30.04
The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives and Broken Hearts
Author: Rubenstein, Julian
Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316071676 Date: 2004
PW
Elmore Leonard meets Franz Kafka in the wild, improbably true story of Attila Ambrus, the legendary outlaw of Budapest.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 8.23.04
In The Shadow of No Towers
Author: Spiegelman, Art
Publisher: Pantheon $ 19.95 ISBN: 0375423079 Date: 2004
PWBooklist
In his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, Art Spiegelman offers a deeply personal, politically charged, graphically and emotionally stunning account of the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001--a no-holds-barred political statement and a revelation of the cultural reach of cartooning.
Suggested Reading: 9/11 Stars | Graphic Novel Stars
Updated 10.4.04
Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2002
Author: Starr, Kevin
Publisher: Knopf $ 35 ISBN: 0679412883 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr--widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California--probes the possible collapse of the California dream and the beginning of another in the years 1990-2003.
Updated 8.12.04
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Author: Stewart, Jon and the Writers of the Daily Show
Publisher: Warner $ 24.95 ISBN: 0446532681 Date: 2004
PW
Timed to coincide with the height of the 2004 presidential election campaign, this book offers insights into America's unique system of government, dissecting its institutions, explaining its history and processes, and exploring modern urban myths.
Updated 9.6.04
Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boy's Life
Author: Stringer, Lee
Publisher: Seven Stories $ 21.95 ISBN: 1583224785 Date: 2004
Booklist
Sleepaway School is Stringer's recounting of his years at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls--a school for kids at risk--and the events that led up to them. This is a "boy-meets-world" story, the chronicle of one child's struggle simply to be.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 6.10.04
The Cincinnati Arch: Learning From Nature in the City
Author: Tallmadge, John
Publisher: Univ of Georgia $ 16.95 ISBN: 0820326909 Date: 2004
Booklist
Updated 10.4.04
On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth WIth the Peregrine Falcon
Author: Tennant, Alan
Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0375415513 Date: 2004
BooklistLJ
In this extraordinary narrative, a passionate observer of nature recounts his all-out effort to radio-track the transcontinental migration of the peregrine falcon--an investigation no one before him had ever taken to such lengths.
Suggested Reading: Nature | Adult Books for Teens | For the Birds
Updated 9.20.04
Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood
Author: Traig, Jennifer
Publisher: Little Brown $ 22.95 ISBN: 0316158771 Date: 2004
LJ
In the bestselling tradition of Running with Scissors and A Girl Named Zippy, Jennifer Traig tells an unforgettable story of youthful obsession.
Suggested Reading: Memoir Stars | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 9.20.04

August

The Portland Vase: the Extraordinary Odyssey of a Mysterious Roman Treasure
Author: Brooks, Robin
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060510994 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Updated 6.30.04
Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up: A Memoir
Author: Feinberg, Barbara
Publisher: Beacon $ 25 ISBN: 0807071447 Date: 2004
PW
Updated 5.17.04
Nightingales: The Story of Florence Nightingale and Her Remarkable Victorian Family
Author: Gill, Gillian
Publisher: Ballantine $ 27.95 ISBN: 0345451872 Date: 2004
PWBooklist
Suggested Reading: Women's History Stars
Updated 7.6.04
Journey From the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
Author: Hakakian, Roya
Publisher: Crown $ 23 ISBN: 1400046114 Date: 2004
PW
This lyrical coming-of-age story creates an intimate portrait of life in Tehran: the author's family and friends, her life at school, her observations of Iran's political life, and her longing to escape a sense of displacement from her home, culture, and language.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 6.1.04
Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scales, and How a Nineteenth Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry
Author: Hueler, Scott
Publisher: Crown $ 23 ISBN: 1400048842 Date: 2004
PWLJ
A writer's fascination with the exquisite intersection of science and language inspires this riveting account of the Beaufort Scale and how a 19th-century admiral turned the measurement into poetry.
Updated 7.19.04
Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict
Author: Hunter, Seb
Publisher: Fourth Estate $ 26.95 ISBN: 0060722924 Date: 2004
PW
Reaching deep into the most embarrassing depths of the family photo album, Hunter offers a witty and touching account of heavy metal mania in the tradition of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.
Suggested Reading: Music - Nonfiction Stars
Updated 4.26.04
Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation
Author: Isaac, Rhys
Publisher: Oxford $ 30 ISBN: 0195159268 Date: 2004
PWKirkus
In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world as it plunged into turmoil.
Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars | Virginia Stars
Updated 6.1.04
Namath
Author: Kreigel, Mark
Publisher: Viking $ 27.95 ISBN: 0670033294 Date: 2004
BooklistPW
Kriegel details football legend Joe Namath's journey from steeltown pool halls to the upper reaches of American celebrity--and beyond. "Namath" is not just for football fans, but for any reader interested in the role of sports in American culture.
Updated 7.6.04
The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda
Author: Mackey, Chris & Greg Miller
Publisher: Little Brown $ 25.95 ISBN: 0316871125 Date: 2004
PW
Hogan and Miller--senior interrogator in Kandahar and a reporter with access to the interrogations--offer an illuminating examination of the psychology and physiology of lying and determining whether someone is telling the truth.
Suggested Reading: Afghanistan Stars
Updated 7.19.04
Slipping Into Paradise: Why I Live in New Zealand
Author: Masson, Jeffrey
Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345466144 Date: 2004
Kirkus
In the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, here is Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s ode to his personal paradise–his adopted home, New Zealand. After living in California, why did Masson settle– out of all the places on earth–in such a faraway land? It turns out that while visiting a beautiful sandy beach just fifteen minutes from bustling Auckland, Masson and his family were utterly seduced by the exotic locale. There was little deliberation. This place, surrounded by lush forest on a bay dotted with volcanic islands, would be their new home.
Masson takes readers on a remarkable journey to another world, as he and his family “slip into” the paradise that is New Zealand. For anyone who has ever dreamed of finding utopia, Masson reveals a country where neighbors talk to one another and provide a sense of real community–rarely, outside of the big cities, locking their doors–and where politics are as mellow as the weather. New Zealand is also a land of spectacular scenery, made even more famous for being the shooting location for the Lord of the Rings films. The flora is plentiful. Mangroves, banana plants, papaya trees, and more than ten thousand species of ferns grow wild and freely. The fauna is benign. There are no snakes, tarantulas, or scorpions. Children can walk to school barefoot without a care– there is nothing to sting them, bite them, or give them a rash. In the blue waters near the lush coastline, dolphins and orcas abound.

While describing his love affair with the country and his affinity for its citizens, Masson reflects on the meaning of home, the importance of acting on intuition, and what happens when we lose our connection to the place we live in. Responding to an impulse, Masson reveals, he realized a dream. - Publisher Marketing
Updated 6.10.04
No Man's River
Author: Mowat, Farley
Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 25 ISBN: 0786714301 Date: 2004
Kirkus
From one of the best-known and best-loved storytellers in the world comes the highly anticipated bridge between People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf.
Updated 7.8.04
Assembling My Father: A Daughter's Detective Story
Author: Oliver, Anna Cypra
Publisher: Houghton $ 25 ISBN: 0618341528 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
Oliver's father's suicide, committed when she was only five years old, has haunted her all her life. In Assembling My Father, she offers the extraordinary chronicle of her journey of discovery to learn who he was and why he died.
Updated 8.13.04
Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall ,and Other Strange Connectons
Author: Pellegrino, Charles R.
Publisher: Morrow $ 25.95 ISBN: 0380973103 Date: 2004
PWBooklist
From Pellegrino comes a fascinating archaeologist's look at Pompeii and its remarkably well-preserved suburb, Herculaneum, as well as an examination of the Vesuvius eruption in comparison with the World Trade Center disaster.
Updated 8.13.04
The Life and Times of Mexico
Author: Shorris, Earl
Publisher: Norton $ 29.95 ISBN: 039305926x Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Driven by 3,000 years of Mexican history and Shorris's original methods of storytelling, this grand narrative offers magnificent scope and profound insight into the divided soul of Mexico.
Updated 7.6.04
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania
Author: St. John, Warren
Publisher: Crown $ 24 ISBN: 0609607081 Date: 2004
Booklist
New York Times writer and Alabama native Warren St. John presents a rollicking RV ride through a season in the heart of football mania with the world's most obsessive sports fans.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 7.6.04
Persepolis 2
Author: Satrapi, Marjane
Publisher: Pantheon $ ISBN: Date: 2004
PW
Funny and heartbreaking, edgy and searingly observant, Satrapi's tale about the life of one adolescent and about the life of an entire nation continues with the same dazzling combination of singular artistry, insight, and storytelling as her first book.
Suggested Reading: Graphic Novel Stars | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 7.26.04
Hey Rube
Author: Thompson, Hunter
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0684873192 Date: 2004
Kirkus
With Hey Rube, Thompson has put together his most hilarious, thought-provoking, genuine, outlandish, and highly irreverent writings from his recent career as columnist on ESPN.com's popular Page 2. This look at Gonzo journalism in his most organic form includes some "extra" columns that have never before been published.
Updated 6.10.04
Borges
Author: Williamson, Edwin
Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670885797 Date: 2004
KirkusPWBooklistLJ
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.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 8.16.04

July

Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
Author: Burrough, Bryan
Publisher: Penguin $ 27.95 ISBN: 1594200211 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Both a hugely satisfying entertainment and a groundbreaking work with powerful echoes in today's news, Burrough's account of America's greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI is the definitive history of America's first war on crime.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 6.30.04
Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome
Author: Gee, Henry
Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393050831 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Evolutionary biologist Gee delivers a remarkably lucid explanation of what the sequencing of the human genome really tells us--and explains that the next frontier is understanding how they interact to direct the growth of an organism.
Updated 5.10.04
Sex With Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge
Author: Herman, Eleanor
Publisher: Morrow $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060585439 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Herman shares the scandalous truth about the illicit relationships of some of history's most powerful men--and the women who slept with them to get to the top.
Updated 7.12.04
All the Centurions: A New York City Cop Remembers His Years on the Street, 1961-1981
Author: Leuci, Bob
Publisher: Morrow $ 24.95 ISBN: 0380976269 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Leuci takes readers into the world of the New York City Police Department at a time when the city was crumbling under its own weight, drugs were taking over the poorer neighborhoods, and crime was rampant on the streets and subways.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 4.26.04
The Last Run: A True Story of Rescue and Redemption on the Alaska Seas
Author: Lewan, Todd
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060196483 Date: 2004
Kirkus
In the tradition of Black Hawk Down and The Perfect Storm comes an epic tale of the daring helicopter rescue of an Alaskan fishing vessel wrecked in the worst Arctic storm in years.
Suggested Reading: Sea Stories
Updated 5.10.04
Politicas: Observations and Arguments, 1966-2003
Author: Hertzberg, Hendrik
Publisher: Penguin $ 27.95 ISBN: 1594200181 Date: 2004
KirkusBooklist
In his most hilarious, devastating and infuriating dispatches from the American scene over four decades, Hertzberg deconstructs politics into components--campaigns, debates, rhetoric, the media, wars, high crimes and misdemeanors, the right, and more.
Updated 6.15.04
The New World of Martin Cortes
Author: Lanyon, Anna
Publisher: Da Capo $ 24.95 ISBN: 0306813645 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Lanyon looks at the absorbing and fascinating life of Cortes--the illegitimate son of a conquistador and an indigenous American woman--who lived grandly and suffered greatly in the new and old worlds of 16th century Spain.
Updated 4.26.04
The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece and Western Civilization
Author: Strauss, Barry S.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 25 ISBN: 0743244508
KirkusBooklist
A scholar who has reexamined the original sources for this stirring narrative presents an exciting, perceptive work of military history and a shrewd analysis of the cultural differences between and even within the contending Persian and Greek factions.
Updated 4.8.04

June

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
Author: Ball, Philip
Publisher: FSG $ 27 ISBN: 0374281254 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Ball shows how much can be understood of human behavior when we cease to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions--whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict--on our laws, institutions and customs.
Updated 3.25.04
The Secret Life of Lobsters
Author: Corson, Trevor
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060555580 Date: 2004
LJ
In this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, Corson escorts the reader onto slippery fishing boats and on treacherous scuba dives to learn about lobsters--who prove to be a masters of the boudoir, lethal boxers, snoopy socialites and underwater bloodhounds.
Suggested Reading: Nature
Updated 4.20.04
Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder and Its Aftermath
Author: Cummins, Jeanine
Publisher: New American Library $ 12.95 (paper) ISBN: 0451210530
PW
This intimate memoir tells of one family's immediate and widely publicized story of surviving a shocking crime and suffering in the aftermath.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars | Memoir Stars
Updated 4.19.04
Acquainted With the Night: An Intimate Journey Through the World After Dark
Author: Dewdney, Christopher
Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1582343969 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating, hour-by-hour journey through the nocturnal realm, covering bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, nightclubs, astronomy, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, ladies of the night, the art of night, and more.
Suggested Reading: Nature
Updated 4.26.04
The Last Man Down: Life on the Edge at Rescue Two Firehouse
Author: Downey, Tom
Publisher: Holt $ 25 ISBN: 0805071695 Date: 2004
Kirkus
A group of gritty, larger-than-life personalities takes center stage as Downey presents the inside story of one of America's most elite firehouses and the extraordinary brotherhood of men who face extreme danger every day.
Updated 4.8.04
Hardline: Life and Death on the U.S. - Mexico Border
Author: Ellingwood, Ken
Publisher: Pantheon $ 25 ISBN: 0375422439 Date: 2004
PW
Ellingwood, who covered the U.S.-Mexico border for the Los Angeles Times from 1998 to 2002, captures the symbiotic relationships between towns on opposite sides of the border, where residents once crossed between countries as easily as crossing a street. He weaves the personal with the historical, chronicling the changing world of the border from the mid-19th century on.
Updated 4.19.04
What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservative Won the Heart of America
Author: Frank, Thomas
Publisher: Metropolitan $ 24 ISBN: 0805073396 Date: 2004
Kirkus
One of "our most insightful social observers" (Los Angeles Times) cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.
Updated 4.8.04
The Dark Heart of Italy
Author: Jones, Tobias
Publisher: North Point $ 24 ISBN: 0865477000 Date: 2004
PWBooklist
Jones recounts his four-year voyage across the Italian peninsula where, instead of the pastoral bliss he expected, he discovers unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 4.19.04
Shadow Divers: The True Story of Two Americans Who Discovered Hitler's Last Sub
Author: Kurson, Robert
Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 0375508589 Date: 2004
PW
This "New York Times" bestseller tells the true adventure of two American scuba divers who discovered a sunken World War II-era German U-boat 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey, and risked everything on a dangerous mission to salvage it.
Suggested Reading: Nonfiction That Reads Like Fiction | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 3.29.04
Gag Rule: On the Stifling of Dissent and the Suppression of Democracy
Author: Lapham, Lewis H.
Publisher: Penguin $ 19.95 ISBN: 1594200173 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Never before, argues Lapham, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream political conversation. Gag Rule is a call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties--the right to raise our voices against the powers that be and have those voices heard.
Updated 4.8.04
Amazonia
Author: Marcus, James
Publisher: New Press $ 24.95 ISBN: 1565848705 Date: 2004 Date: 2004
Booklist
The entertaining story of the first five years of Amazon.com is recounted by employee number 55. "The most impressive aspect . . . is Marcus's sculpting of self into an everyman caught between two magnets--culture and commerce."--David Shields (Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity)
Updated 6.10.04
The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America
Author: Morgan, Edmund S.
Publisher: Norton $ 26.95 ISBN: 0393059200 Date: 2004
PWKirkus 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: All Stars | 1776 Stars
Updated 4.8.04
Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature
Author: Peck, Dale
Publisher: New Press $ 23.95 ISBN: 1565848748 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Rife with textual analysis, historical context, and insights about the power of fiction, Peck hacks away literature's deadwood to discover the vital heart of the contemporary novel.
Updated 3.25.04
Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left
Author: Ross, John
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth $ 15.95 ISBN: 1560255781 Date: 2004
Kirkus
Updated 4.8.04
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Author: Sedaris, David
Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.95 ISBN: 0316143464 Date: 2004
PW
Sedaris returns to his deliriously twisted domain: hilarious childhood dramas infused with melancholy; the gulf of misunderstanding that exists between people of different nations or members of the same family; and the poignant divide between one's best hopes and most common deeds.
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 5.24.04
The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising
Author: Shogan, Robert
Publisher: Westview $ 26 ISBN: 0813340969 Date: 2004
KirkusLJ
Shogan depicts the relatively unrecognized but highly dramatic confrontation culminating at Blair Mountain in West Virginia, between unionized mineworkers, mine owners, and the federal government in the largest armed uprising since the Civil War.
Updated 6.17.04
So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: Dispatches from the Belly of the Beast
Author: Slichter, Jacob
Publisher: Broadway $ 21.95 ISBN: 0767914708 Date: 2004
Kirkus
This perfect guide to the inner workings of the music industry and instant celebrity is a hysterical and witty look at what happens just before and during one's 15 minutes of fame.
Updated 3.25.04
Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan
Author: Thomas, Hugh
Publisher: Random $ 35 ISBN: 0375502041 Date: 2004
Kirkus
From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain’s early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas’s magisterial narrative of Spain in the New World has all the characteristics of great historical literature: amazing discoveries, ambition, greed, religious fanaticism, court intrigue, and a battle for the soul of humankind.

Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. Her monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, had retaken Granada from Islam, thereby completing restoration of the entire Iberian peninsula to Catholic rule. Flush with success, they agreed to sponsor an obscure Genoese sailor’s plan to sail west to the Indies, where, legend purported, gold and spices flowed as if they were rivers. For Spain and for the world, this decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern.

Spain’s colonial adventures began inauspiciously: Columbus’s meagerly funded expedition cost less than a Spanish princess’s recent wedding. In spite of its small scale, it was a mission of astounding scope: to claim for Spain all the wealth of the Indies. The gold alone, thought Columbus, would fund a grand Crusade to reunite Christendom with its holy city, Jerusalem.

The lofty aspirations of the first explorers died hard, as the pursuit of wealth and glory competed with the pursuit of pious impulses. The adventurers from Spain were also, of course, curious about geographical mysteries, and they had a remarkable loyalty to their country. But rather than bridging earth and heaven, Spain’s many conquests bore a bitter fruit. In their search for gold, Spaniards enslaved “Indians” from the Bahamas and the South American mainland. The eloquent protests of Bartolomé de las Casas, here much discussed, began almost immediately. Columbus and other Spanish explorers—Cortés, Ponce de León, and Magellan among them—created an empire for Spain of unsurpassed size and scope. But the door was soon open for other powers, enemies of Spain, to stake their claims.
Great men and women dominate these pages: cardinals and bishops, priors and sailors, landowners and warriors, princes and priests, noblemen and their determined wives.

Rivers of Gold is a great story brilliantly told. More significant, it is an engrossing history with many profound—often disturbing—echoes in the present. - Publisher Marketing
Updated 4.8.04
Under the Weather: How Weather and Climate Affect Our Health
Author: Thomas, Pat
Publisher: Vision $ 15.95 (paper) ISBN: 1904132308 Date: 2004
LJ
Under the Weather explores the fascinating links between the weather and certain medical conditions.
Suggested Reading: Nature
Updated 6.1.04
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
Author: Troost, J. Maarten
Publisher: Broadway $ 12.95 (paper) ISBN: 0767915305
KirkusPW
After racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs, author Troost decided the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the Earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better. This is his hilarious story.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 4.8.04
American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps
Author: Weiss, Philip
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060096861 Date: 2004
PW
Twenty-five years after a young Peace Corps volunteer was murdered and her killer set free, Weiss unravels the truth behind what happened on the South Pacific island and why the government suppressed the case.
Suggested Reading: True Crime Stars
Updated 6.1.04
Infidels: A History of Conflict Between Christendom and Islam
Author: Wheatcroft, Andrew
Publisher: Random $ 29.95 ISBN: 1400062306 Date: 2004
Booklist
In this dazzlingly-written, pull-no-punches account of the long conflict between Christianity and Islam, Wheatcroft delves beneath stereotypes, and looks incisively at how images and ideas, as well as politics, religion, and conquest, fueled a seemingly unquenchable enmity and hostility on both sides across centuries.
Updated 6.10.04
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
Author: Wood, James
Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374177376 Date: 2004
PW
In 23 passionate, sparkling dispatches, Wood defends what he calls "secular comedy"--human, tragicomic, forgiving, bound up with the very origins of the novel--against the narrower "religious comedy" of satire and farce, which is corrective, punitive, and theatrical.
Suggested Reading: Books About Books
Updated 3.11.04

May

An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
Author: Ackerman, Diane
Publisher: Scribner $ 25 ISBN: 0743246721
LJBooklistPW
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).
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 6.1.04
The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West
Author: Bain, David Haward
Publisher: Viking $ 27.95 ISBN: 0670033081
PW
From O

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