Nonfiction Stars - 2006

Nonfiction Stars of 2006 - A selected list of titles.

This reading list is based on personal preferences. It reflects interests history, science, nature, travel, food, 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 | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

December

  • Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones
    Author: Greenfield, Robert
    Publisher: Da Capo $ 24 ISBN: 0306814331 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Recorded during the blazing-hot summer of 1971 in the basement of Keith Richards's palatial mansion by the sea in the south of France, Exile on Main Street freezes forever in time a moment when the Stones and their counterculture audience found themselves at a crossroads, and Greenfield was there.
    Updated 10.16.06
  • Winefred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth
    Author: Hamann, Brigette
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 35 ISBN: 015101308X Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    Updated 8.28.06
  • The Harbor Boys: A Memoir
    Author: Hamilton, Hugo
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060784679 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    From the author of The Speckled People, one of the most lyrical and powerful memoirs of recent times, comes an exploration of another crucial moment in his early life: the summer he spent working at a harbor close to his home in Dublin, at a time of tremendous unrest. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 10.16.06
  • Paris: The Secret History
    Author: Husssey, Andrew
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 32.50 ISBN: 1569613231 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    If Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon described daily life in contemporary Paris, this book describes daily life in the city throughout its history.
    Suggested Reading: Paris
    Updated 10.16.06
  • The King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter: The Man Who Saved Geometry
    Author: Roberts, Siobhan
    Publisher: Walker $ 27.95 ISBN: 0802714994 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Updated 8.10.06
  • The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma
    Author: Thant, Myint-U
    Publisher: FSG $ 25 ISBN: 0374163421 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    The author tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family's history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling.
    Suggested Reading: Burma
    Updated 9.25.06
  • A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings
    Author: Tillyard, Stella
    Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 140006371x Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Compulsively readable, this is the dramatic scandal-ridden tale of a family trapped between the stiff protocols of royalty and their own desires. An unforgettable glimpse of the birth of celebrity culture and the enduring plight of "the royals." - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 8.28.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

November

  • Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy
    Author: Crane, David
    Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375415270 Date: 2006
    starPW
    With full access to all family papers and to the voluminous diaries and records of key participants in the Antarctic expeditions, this richly illuminating biography of Robert Falcon Scott is an absolutely convincing portrait of a complicated hero.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • The Scientist As Rebel
    Author: Dyson, Freeman J.
    Publisher: New York Review $ 27.95 ISBN: 1590172167 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    This collection, by a renowned scientist who is also a lively and distinguished writer, offers fresh and often unexpected perspectives on the history, methods, and ethics of science, as well as informative and accessible ways of thinking about contentious current debates on the relations between science, religion, literature, and society. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 10.16.06
  • The Yellow House
    Author: Gayford, Martin
    Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.99 ISBN: 0316769010 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    This chronicle of the two months in 1888 when Paul Gauguin shared a house in France with Vincent Van Gogh describes not only how these two hallowed artists painted and exchanged ideas, but also the texture of their everyday lives. Includes 60 B&W reproductions of the artists' paintings and drawings from the period.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
    Author: Houpt, Simon
    Publisher: Sterling $ 24.95 ISBN: 1402728298 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Houpt offers an intriguing tour through the underworld of art theft, where the stakes are high and passions run strong. Not only is this volume beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, it tells a story as fascinating as any crime novel.
    Updated 5.21.07
  • The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
    Author: Johnson, Steven
    Publisher: Riverhead $ 26.95 ISBN: 1594489254 Date: 2006
    starPW
    This thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London is a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.
    Updated 10.23.06
  • Blacktop Cowboys: Riders on the Run for Rodeo Gold
    Author: Phillips,Ty
    Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312330367 Date: 2006
    starPW
    This gritty, firsthand account of the world of competitive steer wrestling chronicles the lives of the rodeo cowboys pursuing their dreams to be the best.
    Updated 7.10.06
  • Thunderstruck
    Author: Larson, Erik
    Publisher: Crown $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400080665 Date: 2006
    starLJstarBookliststarPW
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 8.10.06
  • Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph and the Legacy of the American Outlaw
    Author: Vollers, Maranne
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 006059862x Date: 2006
    starPW
    Through a series of exclusive interviews with Eric Rudolph, the prime suspect in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, a celebrated author tells the untold story of an archetypal American terrorist.
    Updated 9.25.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

October

  • A Mermaid's Tale: A Personal Search for Love and Lore
    Author: Adams, Amanda
    Publisher: Greystone $ 24.95 ISBN: 1553651170 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Elusive, seductive, otherworldly, the mermaid is one of the most resonant of female archetypes, persisting across cultures and eras. In this singular study, Amanda Adams uses poetic language and invokes a wide range of representations and disciplines -- from literature, poetry, and mythology to anthropology and folklore -- to reclaim this icon of female power for modern readers. Beginning with Melusina, the bathing mermaid par excellence, Adams describes the seductive sirens and their honeyed songs, the powerful Arctic sea goddess Sedna, and the long-haired "rusalki" of Russian lore, among other legendary mermaids. As she tells their stories, she considers the womanly, passionate, rage-filled, and seductively sweet sides of the mermaid and how those traits reflect the lives and moods of women who live on drier shores. In discovering mermaids and their stories, the author presents a striking narrative of uncovering the unusual, the beautiful, and the extraordinary in her own life. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 9.18.06
  • Satyr Square: A Year, A Life in Rome
    Author: Barkan, Leonard
    Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374254052 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    The bewitching story of Rome teaching a lonely scholar how to discover himself, Satyr Square--part memoir, part literary criticism, part culinary and aesthetic travelogue--is a poignant, hilarious narrative about an American professor spending a magical year in Rome.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 7.11.06
  • The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
    Author: Bryson, Bill
    Publisher: Broadway $ 25 ISBN: 076791936x Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language comes a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the last century.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • We Tell Ourselves in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction
    Author: Didion, Joan
    Publisher: Everymans $ 30 ISBN: 0307264874 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    For the first time, all of Didion's nonfiction writing on place, politics, lifestyle, and cultural figures from the 1960s to 2003 have been gathered together in one volume.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
    Author: Elliot, Jason
    Publisher: St Martins $ 26.95 ISBN: 031230191x Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    The bestselling author of An Unexpected Light conducts a fascinating journey through the cultural and artistic landscape of Iran, both past and present.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 8.28.06
  • Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King
    Author: Fraser, Antonia
    Publisher: Nan Talese $ 32.50 ISBN: 0385509847 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Updated 8.7.06
  • Watching the World Change
    Author: Friend, David
    Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374299331 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPWstarLJ
    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 | All Stars
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
    Author: Goldberg, Jeffrey
    Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0375412344 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    This riveting, deeply affecting story follows an American Jew and a Palestinian who, over the course of more than 15 years, forge a friendship out of what appear to be reconcilable differences.
    Updated 9.19.06
  • Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York
    Author: Gopnick, Adam
    Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 1400041813 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Following Gopnik's bestselling Paris to the Moon and set in New York, Through the Children's Gate is at once a celebration of a newly fragile city and a poignant study of a family trying to find its way, and joy, within it.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug
    Author: Hager, Thomas
    Publisher: Crown $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400082137 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Fast-paced, suspenseful, and utterly satisfying, this is the sweeping history of the discovery of the first antibiotic and its dramatic effect on the world of medicine and beyond
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime
    Author: Hempl, Patricia
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 22 ISBN: 0151015066 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPW
    In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of that woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the increasing rush of the modern era. Her tantalizing meditation takes us to the Cote d'Azur and North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse and his obsessive portraits of languid women, Hampl discovers they were not decorative indulgences but surprising acts of integrity. Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is a dazzling tour de force. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 9.18.06
  • White Masai: An Exotic Tale of Love and Adventure
    Author: Hofmann, Corinne
    Publisher: Amistad $ 24.95 ISBN: 0061131520 Date: 2006
    starPW
    This page-turning tale puts an African spin on Not Without My Daughter when a woman abandons her business, family, and own country to follow a Masai warrior.
    Updated 6.1.06
  • Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir
    Author: Hughes, Robert
    Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 1400044448 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    The outspoken cultural critic and author of the bestselling The Shock of the New and The Fatal Shore now turns his eye inward in an intimate memoir of his early life and times.
    Updated 6.1.06
  • Climbing the Mango: A Memoir of a Childhood in India
    Author: Jaffrey, Madhur
    Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 1400042951 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    Today's most highly regarded writer on Indian food pens an enchanting memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared. Includes a dozen family recipes.
    Updated 8.17.06
  • The Ghost Map
    Author: Johnson, Steven
    Publisher: Riverhead $ 26.95 ISBN: 1594489254 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    This thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London is a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.
    Updated 10.20.06
  • Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia
    Author: Keneally, Thomas
    Publisher: Talese $ 26.95 ISBN: 038551459x Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    With the authority of a brilliant historian and the narrative grace of a great novelist, Keneally recounts the founding of the first penal colony in Australia in 1788.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
    Author: Lewis, Michael
    Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 039306123x Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPWstarLJ
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 10.16.06
  • Cancer Vixen: A True Story
    Author: Marchetto, Marisa Acocella
    Publisher: Knopf $ 22 ISBN: 0307263576 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Marchetto tells the story of her 11-month, ultimately triumphant bout with breast cancer--from diagnosis to cure, and every challenging step in between. It is a portrait of one woman's supercharged life in Manhattan, and a wonderful love story.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season With an Inner-City Debate Squad
    Author: Miller, Joe
    Publisher: FSG $ 26 ISBN: 0374131945 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Miller follows an "academically deficient" inner-city school's debate squad through the 2002 season that ends with a top-ten finish at the national championships in Atlanta.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
    Author: Mitford, Jessica & Peter Y. Sussman (edt)
    Publisher: Knopf $ 35 ISBN: 0375410325 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    The letters of "Decca" Mitford give readers a luminous self-portrait of an inimitable woman, and of 20th-century society, from the inside out.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • Truck: A Love Story
    Author: Perry, Michael
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060571179 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    As with his popular "Population: 485," Perry delivers a truckload of humor, heart, and gardening tips in this chronicle of a year in which he grows his own food, seeks to live peaceably with his neighbors, and sort out his love life.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • The Shakespeare Wars: The Battle to Explain the Bard
    Author: Rosenbaum, Ron
    Publisher: Random $ 35 ISBN: 0375503390 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPWstarBooklist
    Rosenbaum's provocative and illuminating encounters with scholars and directors gives readers new ways of thinking about Shakespeare.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars |Shakespeare
    Updated 9.18.06
  • The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder
    Author: Stashower, Daniel
    Publisher: Dutton $ 25.95 ISBN: 052594981x Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Readers who flocked to Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City will love Stashower's true story of murder and media mania--including the controversial involvement of Edgar Allan Poe--in 1840s New York.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
    Author: Weber, Caroline
    Publisher: Holt $ 27.50 ISBN: 0805079491 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France.
    Suggested Reading: Marie Antoinette
    Updated 7.31.06
  • Blood Brother: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57
    Author: Weisskopf, Michael
    Publisher: Holt $ 25 ISBN: 0805078606 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarLJ
    A powerful account of 18 months in the lives of three soldiers and a journalist, all patients in Ward 57, Walter Reed's amputee wing. A chronicle of devastation and recovery, this is a deeply affecting portrait of the private aftermath of combat casualties.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond
    Author: Winder, Simon
    Publisher: FSG $ 25 ISBN: 0374299382 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Ian Fleming fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death. Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs and humiliations of fandom while illuminating what Bond's evolution says about the conservative movement, sex, the monarchy, food, attitudes toward America, class, and everything in between.
    Updated 8.28.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

September

  • The Mystery Guest: An Account
    Author: Bouillier, Gregoire
    Publisher: FSG $ 18 ISBN: 0374185700 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    This translation marks the English-language debut of an iconoclast who has attracted one of the most passionate cult followings in French literature today. This is the story of how one man got over a broken heart and learned to love again.
    Updated 7.17.06
  • Wake-Up Call
    Author: Breitweiser, Kristen
    Publisher: Warner $ 24.99 ISBN: 0446579327 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    This is the eye-opening, moving, and politically explosive story of a woman who was catapulted from a quiet suburban family life into a courageous battle for justice after her husband was killed in the Trade Center attacks.
    Suggested Reading: 9/11
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Orson Welles: Hello Americans
    Author: Callow, Simon
    Publisher: Viking $ 32.95 ISBN: 0670872563 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBookliststarKirkusstarLJ
    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: All Stars
    Updated 7.17.06
  • Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
    Author: Delisle, Guy
    Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly $ 19.95 ISBN: 1894937791 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    The follow-up graphic novel to the acclaimed Pyongyang: A Journey to North Korea, Shenzhen is entertainingly compact, with Guy Delisle's observations of life in a cold urban city in southern China that is sealed off from the rest of the country by electric fences and armed guards.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Creationists
    Author: Doctorow, E. L
    Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400064953 Date: 2006
    star Kirkusstar Booklist
    Through the eyes of a great American writer, readers will consider the secrets of literary creativity and whether they're different for science or slapstick comedy.
    Updated 8.7.06
  • The First Seven Years, Plus a Few More: A Memoir
    Author: Fo, Dario
    Publisher: Thomas Dunne $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312359179 Date: 2006
    starPW
    An extraordinary coming-of-age memoir by the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright My First Seven Years is Dario Fo's fantastic, enchanting memoir of his youth spent in Northern Italy on the shores of Lago Maggiore. As a child, Fo grew up in a picturesque village teeming with glass-blowers, smugglers and storytellers. Of his teenage years, Fo recounts the struggles of the Fascists and Partisans, the years of World War II, and his own tragicomic experience trying to desert the Fascist army. In a series of colorful vignettes, Fo draws us into a remarkable early life filled with characters and anecdotes that would become the inspiration for his own creative genius. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 8.28.06
  • The Discomfort Zone
    Author: Franzen, Jonathan
    Publisher: FSG $ 22 ISBN: 0374299196 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, this work narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.
    Updated 6.9.06
  • There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children
    Author: Greene, Melissa Fay
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 25.95 ISBN: 1596911166 Date: 2006
    starPWstar Booklist
    This volume is the story of Haregewoin Tefarra, a middle-aged Ethiopian woman of modest means whose home has become a refuge for hundreds of children orphaned by AIDS. Today, Haregewoin runs a school, a daycare system, and a shelter for sick mothers.
    Updated 8.7.06
  • A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII
    Author: Helms, Sarah
    Publisher: Nan Talese $ 27.50 ISBN: 038550845x Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    Once rumored to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny, Vera Atkins climbed her way to the top in Special Operations Executive, or SOE, Britain's secret service created to help the resistance efforts in Nazi-occupied countries. Drawing on recently released government files and unprecedented access to family papers, Helm vividly reconstructs a complex and extraordinary life.
    Suggested Reading: WWII
    Updated 7.11.06
  • The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
    Author: Hodes, Martha
    Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393052664 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    "What a terrific book! I could hardly put it down... A story of triumph over adversity."--James McPherson. Award-winning historian Hodes presents the true, extraordinary story of Eunice Connolly, a woman whose misfortune and defiance make up the grand themes of American history--opportunity and racism, war and freedom.
    Updated 8.29.06
  • The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
    Author: Jacobson, Sid/Ernie Colon
    Publisher: Hill & Wang $ 30/16.95 ISBN: 0809057387/0809057395   Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    This accessible version of the 9/11 Commission's official report on the terrorist attacks, released in 2005, puts at every American's fingertips the most defining event of the century. Jacobson's text faithfully captures the report's investigative thoroughness, while Colon's stunning artwork powerfully conveys the facts, insights, and urgency of the original.
    Suggested Reading: 9/11
    Updated 7.11.06
  • All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone
    Author: MacPherson, Myra
    Publisher: Scribner $ 35 ISBN: 0684807130 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarLJstarPWstarBooklist
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 9.18.06
  • I'm Proud of You: My Friendship With Fred Rogers
    Author: Madigan, Tim
    Publisher: Gotham $ 20 ISBN: 1592402275 Date: 2006
    starPW
    When journalist Madigan met "Mister" Fred Rogers in 1995, his personal life was in shambles. Here is the story of the relationship between a man struggling with living life and the person he calls "the human embodiment of heaven."
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City
    Author: Maynard, Joyce
    Publisher: Jossey-Bass $ 24.95 ISBN: 0787982261 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 8.28.06
  • The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
    Author: Mendelsohn, Daniel
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 27.95 ISBN: 0060542977 Date: 2006
    starPWstar Booklist
    Mendelsohn grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject during his childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, he embarked on a hunt for the remaining eyewitnesses of his relatives' fates. This is their story.
    Updated 8.7.066
  • The Medici Giraffe: And Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power
    Author: Ommanney, Francis Downes
    Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.99 ISBN: 0316525650 Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    This fascinating exploration spans 2,000 years to look at the central role exotic animals have played in war, diplomacy, and the pomp of princes and potentates.
    Updated 8.10.06
  • Tigers in Red Weather: A Quest to See the Last Wild Tigers
    Author: Padel, Ruth
    Publisher: Walker $ 26.95 ISBN: 0802715443 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Poet, writer, and descendant of Charles Darwin, Ruth Padel set out to visit a tropical jungle and wildlife sanctuary in India-- and her visit turned into a remarkable two-year journey through eleven countries in search of that most elusive and most beautiful animal: the tiger. Armed with her grandmother's opera glasses and Tunisian running shoes, she set off across Asia to ask the question: can the tiger be saved from extinction in the wild? - Publisher Marketing
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 7.11.06
  • James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
    Author: Phillips, Julie
    Publisher: St Martins $ 27.95 ISBN: 0312203853 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBookliststarPW
    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: All Stars
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
    Author: Prose, Francine
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0060777044 Date: 2006
    star PW
    Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Wonga Coup: A Tale of Guns, Germs and the Steely Determination to Create Mayhem in Oil-Rich Corners of Africa
    Author: Roberts, Adam
    Publisher: Public Affairs $ 26 ISBN: 1586483714 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Roberts investigates why in 2004, the tiny, oil-rich African nation of Equatorial Guinea became the target of a group of salty British, South African and Zimbabwean mercenaries, traveling on an American-registered ex-National Guard plane.
    Updated 8.16.06
  • Prince of the Marshes: A Year of Governing in Iraq
    Author: Stewart, Rory
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151012350 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    In August 2003, Rory Stewart, a Farsi-speaking British diplomat, was appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. This is the story of his eleven months of negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure.
    Updated 6.9.06
  • A Three Dog Life
    Author: Thomas, Abigail
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 22 ISBN: 0151012113 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    When Abigail Thomas's husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institu-tion. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich, a man who lives in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of his often uncanny perceptions. This wise, plainspoken, beautiful book enacts the truth Abigail discovered in the five years since the accident: You might not find meaning in disaster, but you might, with effort, make something useful of it. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 8.7.06
  • The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, And Why They Matter
    Author: Tudge, Colin
    Publisher: Crown $ 27.95 ISBN: 1400050367 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBooklist
    One of Britain's most highly regarded science writers looks at trees in exquisite, comprehensive detail: what they are, how they live, how they came into being, and the communities known as forests where they live.
    Updated 9.18.06
  • Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
    Author: Wood, John
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 006112107x Date: 2006
    starLJstarPW
    Wood, the executive who made it his business to bring books and schools to children around the developing world, chronicles his life and work, from the start-up years at Microsoft to his life-changing decision to leave, and includes the methods he uses to manage Room to Read with "the efficiency of General Electric and the compassion of Mother Teresa."
    Updated 8.10.06
  • Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Lost Its Way
    Author: Zielenziger, Michael
    Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385513038 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    The world's second wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends.
    Updated 7.11.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

August

  • The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave To the Antarctic
    Author: Bledsoe, Lucy Jane
    Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin $ 19.95 ISBN: 0299218449 Date: 2006
    starPW
    For Lucy Jane Bledsoe, wilderness had always been a source of peace. But during one disastrous solo trip in the wintry High Sierra she came face to face with a crisis: the wilderness no longer felt like home. The Ice Cave recounts Bledsoe's wilderness journeys as she recovers her connection with the wild and discovers the meanings of fear and grace. - Publisher Marketing
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 8.28.06
  • Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death in the Dawn of the 20th Century
    Author: Blum, Deborah
    Publisher: Penguin $ 25.95 ISBN: 1594200904 Date: 2006
    starPW
    At the close of the 19th century, William James, the great philosopher, a founder of the American Psychological Association and brother of author Henry James, proclaimed his belief in ghosts and embarked on a determined, lifelong pursuit of scientific evidence to prove it.
    Updated 7.17.06
  • The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban
    Author: Chayes, Sarah
    Publisher: Penguin $ 25.95 ISBN: 1594200963 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    From a beloved former NPR "crisis jumper" reporter comes a news-breaking eyewitness account of how the U.S. government and armed forces allowed, and even abetted, the tragic return to violent warlordism in Afghanistan following the defeat of the Taliban.
    Updated 6.9.06
  • Back from the Dead: One Woman's Search for the Men Who Walked Off America's Death Row
    Author: Cheever, Joan M.
    Publisher: Halsted $ 24.95 ISBN: 0470017503 Date: 2006
    starLJ

    After representing Walter Whitman, a convicted murderer and Texan Death Row inmate, as a young lawyer, Joan Cheever wanted to discover whether he could have been rehabilitated into the community? Had his execution protected society or was it simple revenge? To find the answers she left her white-picket world and young family and went in search of former residents of Death Row. Her journey led her across the United States, into the lives of these killers. She heard their stories at first hand, sometimes in seedy motels and sometimes at danger to herself. In Back from the Dead Joan reveals these tales of tragedy and failure, of racism and injustice, but also in some cases of triumph and redemption.
    Updated 9.18.06

  • I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
    Author: Eisenstein, Bernice
    Publisher: Riverhead $ 23.95 ISBN: 1594489181 Date: 2006
    star Kirkusstar PW
    In a truly innovative memoir, the author combines her skills as a writer and illustrator to recount her early childhood in the 1950s and fragmented stories of family members lost in the war.
    Updated 6.9.06
  • Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York
    Author: Gilfoyle, Timothy J.
    Publisher: Norton $ 27.95 ISBN: 0393061906 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarLJ
    Meet George Appo, pickpocket, con man, mayor of underworld New York in the late nineteenth century. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler
    Author: Hardyment, Christina
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 29.95 ISBN: 0066209811 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Christina Hardyment has not only given Sir Thomas Malory a biography worthy of King Arthur's greatest chronicler, she has also set it against a fascinating background: an age that would see the high-water mark of medieval chivalry and would also come to be seen as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the modern world. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Unquiet Grave: The FBI's Secret War Against American Indians
    Author: Hendricks, Steve
    Publisher: Thunders Mouth $ 30 ISBN: 1560257350 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    In 1976 the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian activist, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota--or so the FBI said. First-time author Hendricks offers a gripping and long-overdue reexamination of the FBI's decades-long undeclared war against American Indians.
    Updated 7.17.06
  • The Things Between Us: A Memoir
    Author: Montgomery, Lee Begole
    Publisher: Free $ 23 ISBN: 0743292634 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    Peopled by eccentrics and sparkling with humor and grace, Montgomery's memoir tracks her father's illness and death and her fragmented family's reunion.
    Updated 6.9.06
  • The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism
    Author: Sachs, Aaron
    Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670037753 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Cornell University history and American studies professor Aaron Sachs offers a masterly intellectual history of the impact of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American culture and science.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Sailing From Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
    Author: Wells, Colin
    Publisher: Norton $ 22 ISBN: 0553803816 Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    This fascinating intellectual adventure story takes readers back to the fall of a magnificent empire and beyond in order to reveal how a rich cultural heritage traveled the crossroads of history.
    Updated 6.1.06
  • The Looming Tower: Al Queda and the Road to 9/11
    Author: Wright, Lawrence
    Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 037541486x Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPWstarBooklist
    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 | All Stars
    Updated 8.16.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

July

  • Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Adventures of Mozart's Librettist in the Old and New Worlds
    Author: Bolt, Rodney
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 27.95 ISBN: 1596911182 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Updated 4.17.06
  • Friendship: An Expose
    Author: Epstein, Joseph
    Publisher: Houghton $ 24 ISBN: 0618341498 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    The author sketches a witty and incisive anatomy of the modern friendship: its duties and requirements, the various kinds of friendships, the differences between male and female friendships, the complications marriage creates, and even what happens when sex enters the equation.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Monique And the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in Mali
    Author: Holloway, Kris
    Publisher: Waveland $ 17.95 ISBN: 1577664353 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    Updated 6.9.06
  • Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina And the Drowning of New Orleans
    Author: Horne, Jed
    Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400065526 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    Updated 6.9.06
  • Cockeyed: A Memoir of Blindness
    Author: Knighton, Ryan
    Publisher: Public Affairs $ 23.95 ISBN: 1586483293 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    Oliver Sacks meets David Sedaris--this irreverent, tragicomic, politically incorrect, astoundingly articulate memoir about going blind and growing up illuminates not just the author's reality, but the reader's own.
    Updated 4.10.06
  • The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destory America and an Epic Hunt for Justice
    Author: Millman, Chad
    Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.99 ISBN: 0316734969 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    Twenty years after blowing up Black Tom Island in the New York Harbor, the German government had still evaded responsibility for the crime. Three lawyers made it their mission to solve a mystery that began during the first World War and barely ended before the second.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • The Shark God: Enounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific
    Author: Montgomery, Charles
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 006076516x Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Alternately terrifying, moving, and hilarious, with overtones of Melville and Conrad, The Shark God is Montgomery's extraordinary and piercingly intelligent account of both Melanesia's transformation and his own. This defiantly original blend of history and memoir, anthropology and travel writing, marks the debut of a singular new talent. - Publisher Marketing
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 4.18.06
  • Underwater to Get Out of the Rain: A Love Affair With the Sea
    Author: Norton, Trevor
    Publisher: Da Capo $ 25 ISBN: 0306814870 Date: 2006
    starPW
    A celebration of the creatures, the science, and the wonders of the ocean, by the marine biologist known as "Bill Bryson Underwater," this memoir takes readers to depths where the shapes of creatures living without sunlight defy imagination.
    Updated 3.27.06
  • The History of Swimming
    Author: Powers, Kim
    Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 24.95 ISBN: 0786717238 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    Powers details his frantic search for his twin brother Tim who disappears from Manhattan one weekend while in his late 20s. He falls in with two eccentric traveling companions who guide him on the last leg of his quest, driving through the night to the one final place where Tim might be.
    Updated 6.9.06
  • The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
    Author: Quammen, David
    Publisher: Norton $ 22.95 ISBN: 0393059812 Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    Drawing from Charles Darwin's secret "transmutation" notebooks and his personal letters, Quammen has sketched a vivid life portrait of the man whose work never ceases to be controversial.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Cross Country: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels
    Author: Sullivan, Robert
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1582345279 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    Sullivan, who has driven cross-country more than two dozen times, recounts his family's annual summer migration from Oregon to New York, and of moving his family back and forth from coast to coast. In his trademark celebration of the mundane, he investigates everything from the history of the gas pump to the origins of fast food and rest stops.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 4.24.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

June

  • The Afterlife: A Memoir
    Author: Antrim, Donald
    Publisher: FSG $ 20 ISBN: 0374299617 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    From "a fiercely intelligent writer" ("The New York Times") comes a wry, poignant story of the difficult love between a mother and a son. Antrim comes to terms with--and fails to comes to terms with--the nature of addiction and the broken states of loneliness, shame, and loss that remain beyond his power to fully repair.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • The Stolen Prince: Gannibal, Adopted Son of Peter the Great, Great-Grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, and Europe's First Black Intellectual
    Author: Barnes, Hugh
    Publisher: Ecco $ 27.95 ISBN: 0066212650 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    In 1703, a seven-year-old African boy in chains stepped off a slave ship in Constantinople. He claimed to be a prince of Abyssinia and was rescued by Peter the Great. Under the tsar's tutelage, he soared to dizzying heights. This is the extraordinary story of an African slave who became slave-owner and one of the 18th century's most astonishing characters.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • Chameleon Days
    Author: Bascom, Tim
    Publisher: Houghton $ 12 ISBN: 0618658696 Date: 2006
    star PW
    At the age of three, in 1964, Tim Bascom is thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moves from the Midwest to Ethiopia. Unflinchingly observant, young Tim reveals his missionary parents' struggles in a sometimes hostile country.
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
    Author: Bechdel, Alison
    Publisher: Houghton $ 19.95 ISBN: 0618477942 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkusstarBooklist
    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 | All Stars
    Updated 3.16.06
  • Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
    Author: Buford, Bill
    Publisher: Knopf $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400041201 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Expanding on his August 2002 "New Yorker" article, Buford offers a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as "slave" to Mario Batali in the small, chaotic, highest-standards kitchen of Batali's three-star New York restaurant, Babbo.
    Updated 4.3.06
  • The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
    Author: Buzbee, Lewis
    Publisher: Graywolf $ 17 ISBN: 1555974503 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    Buzbee, a former bookseller and sales representative, celebrates the unique experience of the bookstore--the smell and touch of books, getting lost in the deep canyons of shelves, and the silent community of readers.
    Updated 7.11.06
  • Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away
    Author: Cross, June
    Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 067088555x Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    This powerful memoir is a deftly drawn portrait of the ultimately loving relationship between a black girl and the white mother who gave her away.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story
    Author: Dorenstein, Ken
    Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375503595 Date: 2006
    starBookliststar LJ
    In this stunning, emotionally charged memoir, Dornstein pens a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy. Dornstein weaves his own coming-of-age story with that of his brother David, who was killed in the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
    Updated 3.20.06
  • But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Surprising Adventures Through the Celebrity Looking Glass
    Author: Dunn, Jancee
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060843640 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    This funny, touching, and surprisingly romantic memoir brings readers deep inside the culture of celebrity while introducing them to a hilarious and lovable real-life heroine--a Jersey girl-next-door who finds herself working at "Rolling Stone" magazine.
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice
    Author: Feige, David
    Publisher: Little Brown $24.96 ISBN: 031615623X Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    With verve and insider know-how, a young lawyer reveals his outrageous and heartbreaking long day's journey into night court.
    Suggested Reading: Legal Nonfiction
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Big Coal
    Author: Goodell, Jeff
    Publisher: Houghton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0618319409 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    Despite a century-long legacy that has claimed millions of lives and ravaged the environment, why has coal become hot again? In a compelling blend of hard-hitting investigative reporting, history, and business analysis, this work illuminates the stark economic imperatives America faces.
    Updated 4.24.06
  • We Are on Our Own
    Author: Katin, Miriam
    Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly $ 19.95 ISBN: 1896597203 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPW
    A stunning memoir of a mother and her daughter's survival in WWII and their subsequent lifelong struggle with faith In this captivating and elegantly illustrated graphic memoir, Miriam Katin retells the story of her and her mother's escape on foot from the Nazi invasion of Budapest.
    Suggested Reading: Graphic Works
    Updated 3.27.06
  • Burning Rainbow Farm: Stoner Utopia and the War on Weed
    Author: Kuipers, Dean
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1596911425  Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    The gripping story of two marijuana advocates gunned down by the FBI after a five-day standoff. On a mission to build a peaceful, pot-friendly Shangri-La, Tom Crosslin and his lover Rollie Rohm founded Rainbow Farm, a well-appointed campground and concert venue tucked away in rural Southwest Michigan. The farm quickly became the center of marijuana and environmental activism in Michigan, drawing thousands of blue-collar libertarians and hippie liberals, evangelicals and militiamen to its annual hemp festivals. Obscured by the attacks of September 11, their stories will be told here for the first time. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 5.10.06
  • Reduced Shakespeare: The Attention-Impaired Reader's Guide to the World's Best Playwright, Abridged
    Author: Martin, Reed
    Publisher: Hyperion $ 17.95 ISBN: 1401302203 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    In one slim volume, Reduced Shakespeare delivers the play, the life, and the legend in 12 easy pieces--from the theater troupe whose sidesplitting production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged is the longest-running comedy in London's history.
    Updated 4.18.06
  • Stuart: A Life Backwards
    Author: Masters, Alexander
    Publisher: Delacorte $ 20 ISBN: 0385340001 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    Hailed in Britain as "devastating," "inspirational" ("Saturday Telegraph"), "heartbreaking" ("Saturday Telegraph Magazine") and "hilarious" ("The Spectator"), Stuart is the tragic yet ultimately uplifting story of a boy whose life left the rails early and just kept going. - Guardian First Book Award Winner, Whitbread Wward Nominee.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Every Second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart
    Author: McRae, Donald
    Publisher: Putnam$ 25.95 ISBN: 0399153411 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In the tradition of The Right Stuff comes the true story of four men locked in a race to transplant the first human heart--a riveting tale of surgical daring, unyielding ambition, and scientific adventure.
    Updated 4.17.06
  • The Good Good Pig
    Author: Montgomery, Sy
    Publisher: Ballantine $ 21.95 ISBN: 0345481372 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    This charming memoir chronicles Montgomery's touching friendship with a generous soul, who just so happens to be a pig, and the valuable lessons she learns about family, community, and the pleasures of the sweet, green Earth.
    Updated 3.16.06
  • Secrets of the Savanna: The Survival of the Gray Spirits of the Savanna
    Author: Owens, Mark & Delia
    Publisher: Houghton $ 26 ISBN: 0395893100 Date: 2006
    starPW
    The authors spent 23 years in the Zambian wilderness where they started a unique program to lift the villagers out of poverty and allow the wildlife populations to recover from poaching. After more than two decades of work, they were driven out of the country by poachers and ivory smugglers.
    Updated 4.3.06
  • Mayflower: An American Beginning
    Author: Philbrick, Nathaniel
    Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670037605 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBookliststarLJ
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 4.24.06
  • The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son's Memoir
    Author: Reich, Howard
    Publisher: Public Affairs $ 22.95 ISBN: 1586483625 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    A son's memoir of his mother's mental illness and post traumatic stress disorder stemming from the Holocaust reveals the long-hidden horrors of her past and sheds new light on the trauma and persistence of memory.
    Updated 5.16.06
  • A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
    Author: Roberts, Jason
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 26.95 ISBN: 0007161069 Date: 2006
    star Kirkusstar PW
    In an era when the blind were routinely warehoused in asylums, James Holman was studying medicine, fighting the slave trade in Africa, hunting rogue elephants, surviving a frozen captivity in Siberia, and circumnavigating the world alone in the 19th century.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 4.24.06
  • The Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur
    Author: Safina, Carl
    Publisher: Holt $ 27.50 ISBN: 0805078916 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    In his peerless prose, Safina captures the delicate interaction between these gentle giants--the ancient leatherback turtle whose ancestry can be traced back 125 million years--and the humans who are finally playing a significant role in their survival.
    Updated 5.16.06
  • Rumspringa: To Be or Not to be Amish
    Author: Schachtman, Tom
    Publisher: North Point $ 24 ISBN: 086547687x Date: 2006
    starPW
    Through vivid portraits of teenagers in Ohio and Indiana, the author offers an account of Amish life as a mirror to the soul-searching and questing recognized as a generally intrinsic part of adolescence.
    Updated 3.16.06
  • Song of My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White
    Author: Sancton, Tommy
    Publisher: Other $ 24.95 ISBN: 159051243x Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    Set in New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s, Sancton's passionate memoir pays tribute to the white father who raised him and to the black founding fathers of Jazz, "the mens" of Preservation Hall, who inspired and encouraged him as he grew, as a musician, and as a man.
    Updated 5.16.06
  • Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal - Building St. Peter's
    Author: Scotti, R.A.
    Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670037761 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    It was the splendor and the scandal of the age. In 1506, the ferociously ambitious Renaissance Pope Julius II tore down the most sacred shrine in Europe--the millennium-old St. Peter's Basilica built by the Emperor Constantine. Construction of the new St. Peter's spanned two centuries, embroiled 27 popes, and consumed the genius of the greatest artists of the age.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • Getting Stoned With Savages
    Author: Troost, J. Maarten
    Publisher: Broadway $ 12.95 ISBN: 0767921992 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    A rip-roaringly funny account of life in the farthest corners of the world, Getting Stoned with Savages again reveals the wry appreciation of the absurd and infectious joy of discovery that make Troost one of the most engaging and original travel writers around.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 4.10.06
  • The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire
    Author: Zoellner, Tom
    Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312339690 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    Uncovering the truth about diamonds, The Heartless Stone is a journey to the cold heart of the world's most unyielding gem.
    Updated 4.10.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

May

  • 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
    starLJstarPWstarBooklist
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Let Me Finish
    Author: Angell, Roger
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151013500 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkusstarBooklist
    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: All Stars | Sports Stars
    Updated 3.6.06
  • Guests of the Ayatollah
    Author: Bowden, Mark
    Publisher: Atlantic $ 26 ISBN: 0871139251 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Bowden tells the sweeping story of the 1979 Tehran hostage situation through the eyes of the captives, the soldiers sent to free them, the radical, naive Islamist students, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. This is a remarkably detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • House of War: The Pentagon, a History of Unbridled Power
    Author: Carroll, James
    Publisher: Houghton $ 30 ISBN: 0618187804 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarLJstarPW
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 4.10.06
  • Blood and Roses: One Family's Struggle and Triumph During England's Tumultuous Civil War
    Author: Castor, Helen
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0007148089 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Revealing the tapestry of an age, this history of one family's struggle during the War of the Roses is crafted from a rare trove of letters found in a tumbledown stately home.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • Island of Seven Cities: Where the Chinese Settled When They Discovered America
    Author: Chiasson, Paul
    Publisher: St Martins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0312361866 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Using maps, charts, aerial photos, and his own architectural expertise, Chiasson sweeps the reader along as he pieces together the clues and finds that a large Chinese colony thrived in North America long before the European Age of Discovery.
    Updated 5.15.06
  • The Great Match Race
    Author: Eisenberg, John
    Publisher: Houghton $ 25 ISBN: 0618556125 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarKirkus
    In a fast-paced narrative--colorful, rich, and full of record-setting performances and towering personalities--Eisenberg chronicles the tremendous story of the year in which two horses would come to embody a nation galloping inevitably toward civil war.
    Suggested Reading: Horse Tales
    Updated 3.16.06
  • Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life On the Inside
    Author: Firlik, Katrina
    Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400063205 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    This compelling tell-all by a brilliant young doctor cracks open the demanding, fascinating world of brain surgery, doing for the neurosurgeon what Kitchen Confidential did for the professional chef.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World's Most Valuable Coin
    Author: Frankel, Alison
    Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393059499 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Stolen from the U.S. Mint in the depths of the Great Depression, shipped via diplomatic pouch to Egypt, hidden for forty years, seized in a 1996 government sting at the Waldorf-Astoria, and finally sold in a record-setting auction, the only known 1933 twenty-dollar Double Eagle in the world, has inspired the passions of thieves and collectors, lawyers and charlatans.
    Updated 2.13.06
  • Journey of the Jihadist: Inside the Muslim Militancy
    Author: Gerges, Fawaz A.
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 015101213x Date: 2006
    starLJstarBooklist
    In a book that is both deeply personal and brilliantly illuminating, a renowned Middle Eastern expert and media commentator takes readers into the mindset of the jihadi--or holy warrior--who lies behind so many front-page headlines yet remains nearly impenetrable.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War
    Author: Hanson, Neil
    Publisher: Knopf $ 28.95 ISBN: 0307263703 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In a moving story of how the grave of the Unknown Soldier and the ritual of Remembrance Day came to be, this text examines the valiant effort of Rev. David Railton who convinced Prime Minister Lloyd George to create a symbolic burial of one unknown soldier.
    Updated 4.3.06
  • Seed to Seed: The Secret Life of Plants
    Author: Harberd, Nicholas
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $24.95 ISBN: 1582344132 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    A brilliant evocation of the natural and genetic beauty of the plant world, in the form of a year-long journal from one of the world's leading biologists. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
    Author: Hessler, Peter
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 26.95 ISBN: 0060826584 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of 21st-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Strange Piece of Paradise
    Author: Jentz, Terri
    Publisher: FSG $ 27 ISBN: 0374134987 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Powerful and paced like the most riveting of thrillers, this is the electrifying account of Jentz's investigation into the mystery of her near murder. A startling profile of a psychopath, and a moving record of a brave inner journey from violence to hope, this searing, unforgettable work is certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year.
    Suggested Reading: True Crime
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Death in Belmont
    Author: Junger, Sebastian
    Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393059804 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkusstarLJ
    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: All Stars | True Crime
    Updated 4.3.06
  • Hooked: A True Story of Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish
    Author: Knecht, G. Bruce
    Publisher: Rodale $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594861102 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Hooked is a fish story, a global whodunit, a courtroom drama--and a critically important ecological message all rolled into one."--Tom Brokaw. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 3.8.06
  • Doing Nothing: A History of Loungers, Loafers, Bums, and Slakcers in America
    Author: Lutz, Tom
    Publisher: FSG $ 25 ISBN: 0865476500  Date: 2006
    starPW
    Moving with verve and wit through a series of fascinating case studies that illuminate the changing place of leisure in the American republic, this text revises the way readers understand slackers and work itself.
    Updated 2.13.06
  • American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds: The Lives of Five Top Spellers and they Compete for Glory and Fame
    Author: Maguire, James
    Publisher: Rodale $ 24.95 ISBN: 15948621414 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Every spring after a starting pool of 10 million kids narrows to 250 finalists, America's top young spellers face off in a nail-biting contest. This narrative book immerses the reader in a unique subculture, portraying the endearing fraternity of brilliant, eccentric young word nerds who vie for a gold trophy, a hefty check, and a glorious moment of national fame.
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero
    Author: Maraniss, David
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26 ISBN: 0743217810 Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJstarKirkus
    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: All Stars | Sports Stars
    Updated 3.8.06
  • Uncommon Carriers
    Author: McPhee, John
    Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374280398 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    Here, at his adventurous best, the author chronicles his eight years of being out and about with people who work in freight transportation. The prose is distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Man O' War: A Legend Like Lightning
    Author: Ours, Dorothy
    Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312340990 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    "Written with an effortless command of history and language, Man o' War frees thoroughbred racing's greatest icon from nearly a century of mythology and mystery . . . A riveting work, researched meticulously and told brilliantly."--Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home
    Author: Parrado, Nando
    Publisher: Crown $ 25 ISBN: 1400097673 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    The harrowing personal story of the hero of the international bestseller Alive gives a day-by-day account of what happened during the 1972 Andes plane crash and its aftermath and shows how Parrado coped with the stresses; how he kept from giving up; and where he found strength to climb out alive.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
    Author: Pollan, Michael
    Publisher: Penguin $ 26.95 ISBN: 1594200823 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    The bestselling author of the Botany of Desire explores the ecology of eating to unveil why man consumes what he consumes in the 21st century.
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Walking Zero: How We Found Our Place in Space And Time And Why It Matters
    Author: Raymo, Chet
    Publisher: Walker $ 23.95 ISBN: 0802714943 Date: 2006
    star Kirkus
    Noted science writer Chet Raymo explores how we found our place in space and time, and what it has meant to humankind. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 4.24.06
  • Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War
    Author: Sallah, Michael
    Publisher: Little Brown $ 25.95 ISBN: 0316159972 Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    In the spirit of the smash bestsellers Flyboys and Black Hawk Down, Tiger Force puts readers smack in the middle of overwhelming military action and turmoil, telling the story of unspeakable atrocity and unquestionable heroism.
    Updated 4.3.06
  • 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
    starKirkusstarPWstarBookliststarLJ
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
    Author: Wade, Nicholas
    Publisher: Penguin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594200793 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Based on a groundbreaking synthesis of recent scientific findings, this work by an acclaimed "New York Times" science reporter tells a provocative story of mankind's ancient ancestors and the evolution of human nature.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945
    Author: White, David Fairbank
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26 ISBN: 0743229290 Date: 2006
    starPW
    White pens a masterful account of one of the least-known battles of World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic in which U.S., Canadian, and British air and sea forces fought German U-boats for Britian's fate at a dreadful cost.
    Updated 3.27.06
  • Letters to a Young Mathematician
    Author: Stewart, Ian
    Publisher: Basic $ 22.95 ISBN: 0465082319 Date: 2006
    starLJstarPW
    From a renowned mathematician and writer comes an insightful and lively exploration of why mathematics matters.
    Updated 4.18.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

April

  • The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Or Religious Traditions
    Author: Armstrong, Karen
    Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375413170 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPWstarLJ
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 4.3.06
  • The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
    Author: Ball, Philip
    Publisher: FSG $ 26 ISBN: 0374229791 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Called an enemy of the 16th century's medical establishment, Paracelsus attracted myths even before he died. Who was the man behind these stories? Ball exposes a more complex truth--one that emerges only by entering into Paracelsus's time.
    Updated 12.5.05
  • Untold Stories
    Author: Bennett, Alan
    Publisher: FSG $ 27 ISBN: 0374281033 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Untold Stories brings together some of the finest and funniest writing by one of England's best-known literary figures. Bennett's first major collection since "Writing Home" contains previously unpublished work, along with his much celebrated diary for the years 1996 to 2004, and numerous other exceptional essays, reviews, and comic pieces.
    Updated 1.10.06
  • The Last Season
    Author: Blehm, Eric
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060583002 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Blehm delves into the life of Randy Morgenson, who spent 28 summers as a backcountry ranger in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains before he mysteriously vanished. Five years later, his remains were found at the base of a waterfall.
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894
    Author: Brown, Daniel James
    Publisher: Lyons $ 22.95 ISBN: 1592288634 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    On September 1, 1894 two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire in the first and only book on to chronicle the dramatic story that unfolded. Brown has woven together numerous survivors' stories, historical sources, and interviews with forest fire experts in a gripping narrative that tells the fascinating story of one of North America's most devastating fires and how it changed the nation. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Flaubert: A Biography
    Author: Brown, Frederick
    Publisher: Little Brown $ 35 ISBN: 0316118788 Date: 2006
    starLJstarKirkusstarPWstarBooklist
    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 | All Stars
    Updated 3.17.06
  • It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A Memoir of Mother and Daughter
    Author: Burns, Catherine Lloyd
    Publisher: North Point $ 23 ISBN: 0865477086 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Witty and direct, weaving back and forth in time, this volume charts the transformation of a volatile and unique mother-daughter relationship from longing to connection.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union of Dominion of Space
    Author: Cadbury, Deborah
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060845538 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBooklist
    The basis for a four-part "National Geographic" series, this spellbinding account of the race into space includes, for the first time in history, the Russian side of the story.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Our Town: A Lynching, the Town It Haunted, and My Search for the Truth and Reconciliation
    Author: Carr, Cindy
    Publisher: Crown $ 25.95 ISBN: 0517705060 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarLJ
    Intensely compelling, Our Town is Carr's epic account of a brutal lynching that took place in 1930 in Marion, Indiana, and the town's struggle to forget the events of that terrible night.
    Updated 2.14.06
  • My Life in France
    Author: Child, Julia & Alex Prud'Homme
    Publisher: Knopf $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400043468 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    This delightful memoir of Julia's years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence opens with Paul and Julia--a tall, wide-eyed girl from Pasadena who can't cook and doesn't speak a word of French--disembarking in Le Havre, and ends with the launching of the two "Mastering" cookbooks and Julia winning the heart of America as "The French Chef."
    Suggested Reading: Memoirs | Cooked Books
    Updated 2.13.06
  • Sweet and Low
    Author: Cohen, Rich
    Publisher: FSG $ 25 ISBN: 0374272298 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II invented the sugar packet and Sweet 'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Songbird Journeys: The Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds
    Author: Chu, Miyoko
    Publisher: Walker $ 23 ISBN: 0802714684 Date: 2006
    starLJstarBooklist
    Suggested Reading: For the Birds
    Updated 2.14.06
  • Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life
    Author: Dirda, Michael
    Publisher: Holt $ 17 ISBN: 0805078770 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer prize-winning critic Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Mom's Cancer
    Author: Fies, Brian
    Publisher: Abrahms $ 12.95 ISBN: 0810958406 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    The winner of the 2005 Eisner Award in the category of Best Digital Comic for the original Web version, Mom's Cancer is now available as a graphic novel. It offers an honest, unflinching, and sometimes humorous look at the practical and emotional effect that serious illness can have on patients and their families.
    Suggested Reading: Graphic Works
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things
    Author: Frenay, Robert
    Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374113270 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Written in lively prose for lay readers, Pulse shows how ideas that have shaped Western science, industry, and culture for centuries are being displaced by the rapid and dramatic rise of a "new biology"--by human systems and machines that work like living things.
    Updated 1.10.06
  • The First Human
    Author: Gibbons, Ann
    Publisher: Doubleday $ 26 ISBN: 0385512260 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    This dynamic chronicle of the race to find the "missing links" between humans and apes transports readers into the highly competitive world of fossil hunting and into the lives of the ambitious scientists intent on pinpointing the dawn of humankind.
    Updated 2.8.06
  • Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess
    Author: Greene, Gael
    Publisher: Warner $ 25.95 ISBN: 0446576999 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    An acclaimed restaurant critic dishes up a delectable memoir--complete with her favorite recipes--from a lifelong love affair with food, men, and wine.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • One Small Boat: The Story of a Little Girl Lost Then Found
    Author: Harrison, Kathy
    Publisher: Tarcher $ 23.95 ISBN: 158542465x Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    From the author of Another Place at the Table, this story of one little girl's journey through the foster care system forms an intimate portrait of foster care in America and the children whose lives are forever shaped by it.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • Casting With a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa
    Author: Kann, Wendy
    Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805079564 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In this poignant, lyric memoir, a sister's tragic death prompts a woman's unbidden journey into her turbulent African past in colonial Rhodesia--now Zimbabwe--as she explores the heartbreak of loss and belonging, and finally discovers the true meaning of home.
    Updated 5.8.06
  • 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
    Author: Killen, Andreas
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1596910593 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarLJ
    A year of shattering political crisis, 1973 was defined by defeat in Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, the oil crisis, and the Watergate hearings. It was also a year of remarkable creative ferment. In this look back, Killen charts of a year in which post-war prosperity crumbles and modernism gives way to postmodernism.
    Updated 5.4.06
  • A Clone of Your Own?
    Author: Klotzko, Arlene
    Publisher: Cambridge Univ $ 24 ISBN: 0521852943 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    In a lucid and engaging narrative, the author explains why the prospect of human cloning triggers man's deepest hopes and darkest fears, and forces people to consider what it would mean to have "a clone of your own."
    Updated 11.22.05
  • Field Notes from a Catastophe
    Author: Kolbert, Elizabeth
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 22.95 ISBN: 1596911255 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Known for her insightful and thought-provoking journalism, "New Yorker" writer Kolbert now tackles the controversial subject of global warming.
    Updated 12.5.05
  • Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women
    Author: Makdisi, Jean Said
    Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393061566 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPW
    Using unpublished family documents, the remembrances of friends and acquaintances, and histories of the region and period, Makdisi traces her family's personal story against the backdrop of political events as they take place in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States.
    Updated 2.16.06
  • When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century
    Author: Pearce, Fred
    Publisher: Beacon $ 26.95 ISBN: 0807085723 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    Veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce traveled to more than thirty countries while researching When the Rivers Run Dry; it is our most complete portrait yet of the growing world water crisis. Deftly weaving together the complicated scientific, economic, and historical dimensions of the crisis, he shows us its complex origins, from waste to wrong-headed engineering projects to high-yield crop varieties that have kept developing countries from starvation but are now emptying their water reserves. And Pearce's vivid reportage reveals the personal stories behind failing rivers, barren fields, desertification, water wars, floods, and even the death of cultures. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 3.6.06
  • The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution
    Author: Polk, William R.
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060750901 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    From the author of Understanding Iraq comes a concise, interpretive overview of colonial America and how it grew and developed from before Columbus to the Revolution.
    Updated 1.25.06
  • Shooting Water: A Memoir of Second Chances, Family and Filmmaking
    Author: Saltzman, Devyani
    Publisher: Newmarket $ 23.95 ISBN: 1557047111 Date: 2006
    starLJstarPW
    This debut memoir, an intimate story of second chances, love and redemption, spans three continents and four countries, as a daughter rekindles her relationship with her filmmaker mother during the production of "Water," Deepa Mehta's most controversial movie.
    - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 5.15.06
  • Unholy Messenger: the Life and Crimes of the BTK Serial Killer
    Author: Singular, Stephen
    Publisher: Scribner $ 23 ISBN: 0743291247 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    More than just true crime, Unholy Messenger is a powerful, thoroughly engrossing examination of the intersection between good and evil, and of the psychology and spirituality of a killer in whom faith and bloodshed converged. - Publisher Marketing
    Suggested Reading: True Crime
    Updated 5.4.06
  • You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir
    Author: Soyinka, Wole
    Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 037550365x Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Treasure Islands: Sailing the South Seas in the Wake of Fanny and Robert Lewis Stevenson
    Author: Stephenson, Pamela
    Publisher: Headline $ 35/$19.95 ISBN: 0755312856/0753314050 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Updated 5.10.06
  • Places in Between
    Author: Stewart, Rory
    Publisher: Harvest $ 14 ISBN: 0156031566 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    In January 2002, Rory Stewart survived a walk across Afghanistan by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. In this memoir, he writes about heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers as he makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 2.28.06
  • My Lives
    Author: White, Edmund
    Publisher: Ecco $ 25.95 ISBN: 0066213975 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    In this autobiography filled with humor and social history, one of today's most revered writers evokes past moments and draws portraits of the interesting and celebrated people he has met during his extraordinary life.
    Suggested Reading: Authors
    Updated 1.17.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

March

  • The $64 Tomato
    Author: Alexander, William
    Publisher: Algonquin $ 23.95 ISBN: 1565125037 Date: 2006
    starPW
    A gardener with an existential bent, Alexander gives excellent advice about everything from peaches to leeks, while tackling such questions as What do our gardens tell us about ourselves? Do we get the gardens we deserve? And why does the groundhog have to take one bite from half a dozen tomatoes when any gardener would gladly grant him six bites of just one? - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 11.21.05
  • A Fine Place to Daydream: Racehorses, Romance and the Irish
    Author: Barich, Bill
    Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 1400042798 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Twenty-five years after Laughing in the Hills, Barich pens another racetrack classic, about how he fell in love and found a new life in Dublin, where he was soon caught up in the Irish obsession with horses and wagers.
    Suggested Reading: Horse Tales
    Updated 2.16.06
  • Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape
    Author: Belleville, Bill
    Publisher: Univ Press of Florida $ 24.95 ISBN: 0813029287 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    As development threatens his very sense of place, this award-winning nature writer finds hope in the rediscovery and appreciation of his historic Cracker farmhouse.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Do (Not) Feed the Bears: The Fitful History of Wildlife and Tourists in Yellowstone
    Author: Biel, Alice Wondrak
    Publisher: Univ Press of Kansas $ 15.95 ISBN: 0700614583 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Biel's entertaining and informative account tracks this gradual "renaturalization" while also providing a cautionary tale about the need for careful negotiation at the complex nexus of tourists, bears, and all things wild. - Publisher Marketing.
    Suggested Reading: Nature
    Updated 1.10.06
  • A Piece of Cake: A Memoir
    Author: Brown, Cupcake
    Publisher: Crown $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400052289 Date: 2006
    starPW
    From beloved daughter to abused foster child to prostitute and gang member, Cupcake Brown took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it. In A Piece of Cake, she candidly recounts her remarkable story.
    Suggested Reading: Memoirs
    Updated 11.21.05
  • Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War
    Author: Burleigh, Michael
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 29.95 ISBN: 0060580933 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In this magisterial history, the author of The Third Reich sheds new light on the epic struggles between church and state, from the French Revolution to the totalitarian movements of the 20th century.
    Updated 1.3.06
  • Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Centry Muslim Between Worlds
    Author: Davis, Natalie Zemon
    Publisher: Hill & Wang $ 27.50 ISBN: 0809094347 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    An engrossing study of Leo Africanus and his famous book, which introduced Africa to European readers Al-Hasan al-Wazzan--born in Granada to a Muslim family that in 1492 went to Morocco, where he traveled extensively on behalf of the sultan of Fez--is known to historians as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe (in 1550). He had been captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the pope, then released, baptized, and allowed a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone. In this fascinating new book, the distinguished historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary, partial, and often contradictory traces that al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him, and a superb interpretation of his extraordinary life and work. Davis describes all the sectors of her hero's life in rich detail, scrutinizing the evidence of al-Hasan's movement between cultural worlds; the Islamic and Arab traditions, genres, and ideas available to him; and his adventures with Christians and Jews in a European community of learned men and powerful church leaders. In depicting the life of this adventurous border-crosser, Davis suggests the many ways cultural barriers are negotiated and diverging traditions are fused. - Publisher Marketing
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 2.28.06
  • The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge
    Author: Dunlop, Nic
    Publisher: Walker $ 24 ISBN: 0802714722 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    In a haunting blend of history and testimony, photographer Nic Dunlop returns to the killing fields of Cambodia to tell the story of Khmer Rouge revolutionary Comrade Duch.
    Suggested Reading: Cambodia
    Updated 12.5.05
  • Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France
    Author: Eberstadt, Fernanda
    Publisher: Knopf $ 24.95 ISBN: 037541116x Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    From the author of The Furies comes a beautifully reported story of Gypsies, the spellbinding, little-known France they have called home for centuries, and of her remarkable journey among them.
    Suggested Reading: Music
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir
    Author: Erlbaum, Janice
    Publisher: Villard $ 21.95 ISBN: 1400064228 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    Janice Erlbaum paints a wry, mesmerizing portrait of being underprivileged, underage, and underdressed in the 1980s, bouncing from shelters to group homes, from tenement squats to legendary nightclubs. A moving and tremendously entertaining ridethrough the seediest parts of New York City, Girlbomb provides an unflinching look at street life, survival sex, female friendships, and first loves. - Publisher Marketing
    Suggested Reading: Memoirs
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change
    Author: Flannery, Tim
    Publisher: Atlantic $ 25 ISBN: 0871139359 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPWstarLJ
    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: All Stars | Weather
    Updated 11.23.05
  • On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene
    Author: Gonzalez-Crussi, F.
    Publisher: Overlook $ ISBN: Date: 2006
    star PW
    A probing and profoundly insightful literary meditation on vision exploring the breadth of fascinating phenomena associated with seeing afrom the award winning author. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
    Author: Grayling, A.C.
    Publisher: Walker $ 25.95 ISBN: 0802714714 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPW
    Rarely is the victor's history re-examined, and A. C. Grayling does so with deep respect and with a sense of urgency "to get a proper understanding for how peoples and states can and should behave in times of conflict." Addressing one of today's key moral issues, Among the Dead Cities is both a dramatic retelling of the World War II saga, and vitally important reading for our time. - Publisher Marketing
    Updated 12.5.05
  • The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise
    Author: Grunwald, Michael
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26 ISBN: 0743251059 Date: 2006
    star PW starBooklist starKirkus
    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: All Stars | Nature
    Updated 2.8.06
  • No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
    Author: Harris, Judith Rich
    Publisher: Norton $ 26.95 ISBN: 0393059480 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    From the author of the controversial book The Nurture Assumption comes the answer to a question that has long been a mystery: Why do identical twins who grow up together--same genes, reared by the same parents--differ in personality?
    Updated 2.28.06
  • The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell
    Author: Kurlansky, Mark
    Publisher: Ballantine $ 23.95 ISBN: 0345476387 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkusstarLJ
    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: All Stars | Cooked Books
    Updated 1.31.06
  • Not Buying It
    Author: Levine, Judith
    Publisher: Free $ 25 ISBN: 0743269357 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    This cold-turkey confession by an award-winning journalist follows her progress--and inevitable relapses--over an entire year of not spending.
    Suggested Reading: Shopping
    Updated 12.7.05
  • A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveler
    Author: Mayes, Frances
    Publisher: Broadway $ 26 ISBN: 0767910052 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    The author of the bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun expands her horizons to immerse herself--and her readers--in the sights, aromas, and treasures of 12 new special places, in this illuminating and passionate book that is also a celebration of the allure of travel.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Buile Nations . . . One School at a Time
    Author: Mortenson, Greg & David Oliver Relin
    Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670034827 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Updated 1.10.06
  • Miracles on the Water: The Survivors of the Attack on the S.S. City of Benares
    Author: Nagorski, Tom
    Publisher: Hyperion $ ISBN: 1401301509 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Based on firsthand accounts from child survivors and other passengers, including the author's great-uncle, Miracles on the Water is an unforgettable story of children in wartime, of heroism at sea, and of courage and the power of the human spirit.
    Suggested Reading: Sea Stories
    Updated 1.3.06
  • Enrique's Journey
    Author: Nazario, Sonia
    Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 1400062055 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    A "Los Angeles Times" journalist offers her 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning story in book form--a timely account of a young Honduran boy's perilous quest to reunite with his mother in the United States.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Mixed: My Life in Black and White
    Author: Nissel, Angela
    Publisher: Villard $ 12.95 ISBN: 0345481143 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    By turns a comedy of errors and a moving coming-of-age chronicle, this candid, funny, and poignant memoir traces one woman's unforgettable journey to self-acceptance and belonging as she recounts her life as a female of biracial descent.
    Updated 1.10.06
  • The Rock from Mars: A True Detective Story on Two Planets
    Author: Sawyer, Kathy
    Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400060109 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarLJ
    In this thrilling detective story on two planets, Sawyer takes readers behind the scenes of the remarkable quest to identify what could be the first known signs of extraterrestrial life.
    Updated 1.30.06
  • My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud
    Author: Smith, Janna Malamud
    Publisher: Houghton $ 24 ISBN: 0618691669 Date: 2006
    starPW
    On the 20th anniversary of Bernard Malamud's death, Janna Malamud Smith explores her father's private, unpublished letters and journals to remember the life of this seminal writer of our time.
    Suggested Reading: Authors
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Never Drank the Kool-Aid: Essays
    Author: Toure
    Publisher: Picador $ 15 ISBN: 0312425783 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    From the inimitable Tour comes a collection of wickedly amusing essays, delivered from the pop culture front lines of taste-making America.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
    Author: Trussoni, Danielle
    Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805077324 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBookliststarLJ
    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: All Stars | Memoirs
    Updated 1.26.06
  • Flapper: The Notorious Life and Scandalous Time of the First Thoroughly Modern Woman
    Author: Zeitz, Joshua
    Publisher: Crown $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400080533 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Through the madcap lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Lois Long, Coco Chanel, Clara Bow, and other Jazz Age luminaries, Flapper tells the fascinating story of the new woman and the making of modern culture.
    Updated 2.16.06
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

February

  • While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Detroying the West from Within
    Author: Bawer, Bruce
    Publisher: Doubleday $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385514727 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    The author of A Place at the Table warns that Europe can no longer ignore the clash of civilizations raging on its own territory and around the world. Failure to recognize the problems and react quickly, he predicts, will lead to a virulent right-wing nationalism of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
    Updated 1.21.06
  • On the End
    Author: Berman, Marshall
    Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 1400063310 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    From the acclaimed writer and cultural critic comes a unique look at New York City and Times Square through the lens of the works of art they inspired.
    Updated 12.5.05
  • Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945
    Author: Bosworth, R.J.B.
    Publisher: Penguin $ 35 ISBN: 1594200785 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    The author brings to life the period in which Italians participated in one of the 20th century's largest, most notorious, and ultimately ruinous political experiments--Fascism--under Benito Mussolini and his henchmen.
    Updated 12.7.05
  • At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years,1965-68
    Author: Branch, Taylor
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 35 ISBN: 068485712X Date: 2006
    star PW starKirkus
    The final volume of Branch's magisterial history of the Civil Rights movement is a powerful rendering of Martin Luther King Jr.'s final years. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that King has earned a place next to Abraham Lincoln in American history.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi
    Author: Broad, William J.
    Publisher: Penguin $ 25.95 ISBN: 1594200815 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author describes how a team of scientists, working from subtle clues scattered throughout the ancient literature, as well as from the latest findings in geology, uncovered scientific evidence to explain the Oracle of Delphi's powers.
    Updated 1.21.06
  • Better For All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity
    Author: Bruinius, Harry
    Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375413715 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and documents never before used, Bruinius relates the little-known history of eugenics in America--a movement that began in the early 20th century and resulted in forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans.
    Updated 1.21.06
  • A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
    Author: Caldwell, Gail
    Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400062489 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPW
    The chief book critic for "The Boston Globe" and winner of the Pulitzer Prize beautifully evokes her life, in this exquisite memoir, from her 1950s childhood in the Texas Panhandle through the 1960s and beyond.
    Updated 2.16.06
  • The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920's New York
    Author: Duncombe, Stephen & Andrew Mattson
    Publisher: New York Univ Press $ 29.95 ISBN: 0814719805 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Ripped straight from the headlines of the Jazz Age, The Bobbed-Haired Bandit is a tale of flappers and fast cars, of sex and morality. It is the story of a poor, 19-year-old laundress from Brooklyn who robbed a string of New York grocery stores with a "baby automatic," a fur coat, and a fashionable bobbed hairdo.
    Suggested Reading: True Crime
    Updated 2.7.06
  • Fish on Friday
    Author: Fagan, Brian M.
    Publisher: Basic $ 26 ISBN: 0465022847 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Updated 11.21.05
  • Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four
    Author: Feinstein, John
    Publisher: Little Brown $ 25.95 ISBN: 031616030x Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Exploring what it means to be a school, a coach, and a player in college basketball's Final Four, Feinstein exposes the driving forces behind one of the most revered events in American sports. Readers will also find dramatic stories from the officials and referees to the scouts and ticket-scalpers.
    Suggested Reading: Sports Stars
    Updated 1.21.06
  • David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of Western Civilization
    Author: Finkelstein, Israel & Neil Asher Silberman
    Publisher: Free $ 26 ISBN: 0743243625 Date: 2006
    starPW
    The authors of the international bestseller The Bible Unearthed return withthe history of the Bible's sacred kings.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • A Temple of Texts: Essays
    Author: Gass, William H.
    Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 0307262863 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBooklist
    Updated 1.21.06
  • 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
    starPWstarLJstarBooklist
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 1.21.06
  • The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule
    Author: Kavenna, Joanna
    Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670034738 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    The author set out on a harrowing and exhilarating voyage of discovery from Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard in search of this most haunting of northern places, the mysterious lost world of Thule.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 2.16.06
  • The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold
    Author: Kryza, Frank T.
    Publisher: Ecco $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060560649 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    In the first decades of the 19th century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers and fortune hunters than the lost city of Timbuktu. This is the true story of Alexander Gordon Laing and the race to discover the city at a time when the continent was still largely unchartere d.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 11.22.05
  • American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
    Author: Levy, Bernard-Henri
    Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400064341 Date: 2006
    starPW
    France's leading writer travels the country to discover what it means to be an American, and what American can be, at the dawn of the 21st century.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 12.5.05
  • Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
    Author: Merridale, Catherine
    Publisher: Holt $ 30 ISBN: 0805074554 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Drawing on previously closed archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Red Army rank and file.
    Updated 1.21.06
  • My Battle of Algiers
    Author: Morgan, Ted
    Publisher: Harper $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060852240 Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkusstarLJ
    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.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 1.18.06
  • Condor: To the Brink and Back - The Life and Times of One Giant Bird
    Author: Nielsen, John
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060088621 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    The California condor, a bird that has a wingspan of 9-1/2 feet and once competed with sabre-toothed cats for the carcasses of mastodons, should be extinct. This is the story of a giant bird that has repeatedly sailed past the brink of extinction and the people who fought to save it.
    Suggested Reading: For the Birds
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America
    Author: Press, Eyal
    Publisher: Holt $ 26 ISBN: 0805077316 Date: 2006
    star PW starBooklist
    In 1998, one of only two doctors in Buffalo, New York, who performed abortions was shot dead by a radical antiabortion activist. The son of the surviving doctor now presents a gripping account of a family and a city caught in the crossfire of moral fervor and individual rights in the fierce battle over abortion.
    Updated 3.6.06
  • Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent
    Author: Rapp, Anthony
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 25 ISBN: 0743269764 Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    In this lovingly crafted memoir that captures the passion and grit unique to the performing life, Rapp recounts his life-changing experience as an original cast member in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent.
    Suggested Reading: Music
    Updated 11.22.05
  • Lost Mountain
    Author: Reece, Eric
    Publisher: Riverhead $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594489084 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarLJ
    This groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction exposes how radical strip mining is destroying one of America's most precious natural resources and the communities that depend upon it.
    Updated 2.16.06
  • The Caliph's House
    Author: Shah, Tahir
    Publisher: Bantam $ 22 ISBN: 0553803999 Date: 2006
    starPW
    By turns hilarious and harrowing, this work by an acclaimed English travel writer is the story of his family's move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge--and nothing is as easy as it seems.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 12.2.05
  • Hanging Captain Gordan: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader
    Author: Soodalter, Ron
    Publisher: Atria $ 26 ISBN: 0743267273 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Uncovering a forgotten story, this is the first book to chronicle the trial and execution of Nathaniel Gordon, the only man in American history to face conviction for the largely unprosecuted and unpunished crime of slave trading.
    Updated 2.16.06
  • Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss & Survival in Iraq
    Author: Spinner, Jackie & Jenny Spinner
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 074328853x Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    "Washington Post" reporter Jackie Spinner covered the war in Iraq from May 2004 to March 2005 and rose from the most junior reporter to the "Post's" Baghdad Bureau Chief. Here, she chronicles the nine months she spent living and reporting in Iraq.
    Suggested Reading: Iraq
    Updated 2.16.06
  • Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season
    Author: Stutz, Bruce
    Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 0743262476 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Driving a 20-year-old Chevy, Stutz set out on a three-month journey through the unfolding of an American spring, showing readers that spring is a transformation in the greening landscape as well as in the human spirit.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Manhunt: The 12-day Chase to Catch Lincoln's Killer
    Author: Swanson, James L.
    Publisher: Morrow $ 26.95 ISBN: 0060518499 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    Combining historical research with page-turning narration, this is the first book devoted to the 12 dramatic days between the murder of President Abraham Lincoln and the capture of his killer.
    Suggested Reading: Lincoln
    Updated 11.22.05
  • Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids
    Author: Szalavitz, Maia
    Publisher: Riverhead $ 25.95 ISBN: 1594489106 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    Weaving careful reporting with astute analysis, Szalavitz has written an important and timely survey that will change the way that readers look at rebellious teens and the people to whom parents entrust them.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Self-Made Man
    Author: Vincent, Norah
    Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670034665 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBooklist
    Narrated with exquisite insight, humor, and empathy, the author uses her firsthand experience--the 18 months she masqueraded as a man--to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity.
    Suggested Reading: Gender Identity
    Updated 12.28.05
  • Everything Than Rises: A Book of Convergences
    Author: Weschler, Lawrence
    Publisher: McSweeneys $ 29 ISBN: 193241634x Date: 2006
    starPW
    Updated 12.2.05
December | November | October | September | August
July | June | May | April | March | February | January

January

  • The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded World
    Author: Adams, Jonathan S.
    Publisher: Beacon $ 27.95 ISBN: 0807085103 Date: 2006
    star LJ
    The Future of the Wild is a much needed, accessible book full of fascinating stories, unforgettable characters, and, ultimately, a powerful new vision for conservation in America. - Publishers Marketing
    Suggested Reading: Nature
    Updated 12.27.05
  • The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France
    Author: Andress, David
    Publisher: FSG $ 26 ISBN: 0374273413 Date: 2006
    star LJ
    In a remarkably vivid and page-turning work of history, the author transports the reader from the pitched battles on the streets of Paris to the royal family's escape through secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, and across the landscape of the tragic last years of the French Revolution.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • Men of Salt: Across the Sahara with the Caravan of White Gold
    Author: Benanav, Michael
    Publisher: Lyons $ 23.95 ISBN: 1592287727 Date: 2006
    starPW
    Benanav became one of the few Westerners to ever join the Caravan of White Gold. Following his amused guide, Benanav lived for weeks among the camel drivers, marching 18 hours a day for nearly a thousand miles through sandstorms and searing heat to the salt mines of the Sahara in this gripping narrative of a unique Islamic culture.
    Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
    Updated 10.11.05
  • The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader
    Author: Bergen, Peter L.
    Publisher: Free Pr $ 26 ISBN: 0743278917 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    The author of Holy War, Inc. and a leading expert on al Qaeda offers a unique portrait of the world's most wanted man, a brilliant, seamless blending of interviews with people who know Osama bin Laden personally. Bergen has known and followed bin Laden since 1997.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Lincoln
    Author: Carwardine, Richard
    Publisher: Knopf $ 27.50 ISBN: 1400044561 Date: 2006
    starPW
    This original and insightful biography of Abraham Lincoln has already been awarded the prestigious Lincoln Prize.
    Suggested Reading: Lincoln
    Updated 11.21.05
  • Betrayed: The Assassination of Digna Ochoa
    Author: Diebel, Linda
    Publisher: Caroll & Graf $ 27 ISBN: 078671753x Date: 2006
    starPWstarKirkus
    Despite a note beside her body addressed to other "sons-of-bitch" human rights lawyers, the Mexican government ruled Digna Ochoa's violent death "probable suicide" and slammed the case shut in July 2003. But Linda Diebel, a three-time recipient of the Amnesty International Media Award, will not let Ochoa's story die. "Betrayed offers her chilling account of a cold-blooded murder and a cover-up that reaches into the top echelons of the Mexican government. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • Desert Children
    Author: Dirie, Waris
    Publisher: Time Warner $ 16.95 ISBN: 1844082520Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    U.N. Special Ambassador and courageous spirit, Waris Dirie was born to a family of tribal nomads in Somalia. Desert Children tells how Waris and the journalist Corinna Milborn investigated the practice of FGM in Europe - they estimate that up to 500,000 women and girls have undergone or are at risk of FGM. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 3.8.06
  • The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
    Author: Egan, Timothy
    Publisher: Houghton $ 28 ISBN: 061834697x Date: 2006
    starPW
    Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains during the Depression, going from sod huts to new framed houses to basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.
    Updated 12.2.05
  • The Cold War: A New History
    Author: Gaddis, John Lewis
    Publisher: Penguin $ 27.95 ISBN: 1594200629 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    Beginning with World War II and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the author provides a thrilling account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age, rich with illuminating portraits of its major personalities and fresh insight into its most crucial events.
    Updated 11.14.05
  • White on Black
    Author: Gallego, Ruben
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 22 ISBN: 015101227x Date: 2006
    starKirkus
    This is an extraordinary personal testament, the story of one boy's triumph in the face of impossible obstacles. Born with cerebral palsy in Moscow, Ruben Gallego was hidden away in Soviet state institutions by his maternal grandfather, the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s. His was a boyhood spent in orphanages, hospitals, and old-age homes, a life of emotional deprivation and loss of human dignity. And yet, there is no self-pity here, no bitterness, only an unfailing regard for the truth. Gallego's story is one of neglect and mistreatment but also of shared small pleasures, of courage, of the power of the human will, and of a child's growing fascination with books and the worlds he finds in them. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize, White on Black is "one of those rare books one can call revolutionary" (Corriere della Sera, Italy). - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 9.26.05
  • Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times
    Author: Ghosh, Amitav
    Publisher: Houghton $ 25 ISBN: 0618378065 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In a thirty-year career in journalism, Ghosh has written extraordinary firsthand accounts of catastrophic events in every part of the world. For the first time, Incendiary Circumstances brings together the finest of these pieces--many of them never published in the States--in a remarkable and compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 9.26.05
  • Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, a Cultural Study
    Author: Gilbert, Sandra M.
    Publisher: Norton $ 29.95 ISBN: 0393051315 Date: 2006
    starPWstarLJ
    Exploring expressions of faith, burial customs, photographs, poems, and memoirs, acclaimed author Sandra M. Gilbert brings to the topic of death the critical skill that won her fame for The Madwoman in the Attic and other books, as she examines both the changelessness of grief and the changing customs that mark contemporary mourning. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 10.17.05
  • Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music
    Author: Glover, Jane
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 27.95 ISBN: 0060563508 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    The compelling story of the women in Mozart's life and in his operas is published in time for the 250th anniversary of his birthday in January. Rich and evocative, it illuminates the music and the man, but, above all, the women who inspired him.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • The Making of a Writer: The Journals of Gail Godwin, 1961-1963
    Author: Godwin, Gail
    Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400064325 Date: 2006
    starPWstarBooklist
    The coming of age of a young writer is told through her intimate journals--from the "New York Times" bestselling novelist and three-time National Book Award nominee.
    Suggested Reading: Authors
    Updated 10.11.05
  • Glory Road: My Story of the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship and How One Team Triumphed against the Odds and Changed America Forever
    Author: Haskins, Don & Dan Wetzel
    Publisher: Hyperion $ 14.95 ISBN: 1401307914 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Timed to the release of Jerry Bruckheimer's movie of the same name, this is the moving autobiography of Hall of Fame basketball coach Don Haskins and his storied team of players, the Texas Western Miners.
    Suggested Reading: Sports Stars
    Updated 1.21.06
  • Why People Die of Suicide
    Author: Joiner, Thomas
    Publisher: Harvard Univ $ 24.95 ISBN: 0674019016 Date: 2006
    star LJ
    In the wake of a suicide, the most troubling questions are invariably the most difficult to answer: How could we have known? What could we have done? And always, unremittingly: Why? Written by a clinical psychologist whose own life has been touched by suicide, this book offers the clearest account ever given of why some people choose to die. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
    Author: Kazin, Michael
    Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 0375411356 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarBookliststarLJ
    This illuminating biography of William Jennings Bryan restores the fundamentalist to his place in American history--as a hero and leader of the Christian left.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • She Got Up Off the Couch
    Author: Kimmel, Haven
    Publisher: Free $ 24 ISBN: 0743284992 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarLJ
    Kimmel's powerful storytelling is in evidence in this riveting continuation of Zippy's childhood--a story of risk-taking, motherly love, and small-town heroism. The author introduces new friends as readers put together the puzzle of Zippy's life as she works out what is happening to her nuclear family.
    Suggested Reading: Memoirs
    Updated 1.18.06
  • The Judgement of Paris
    Author: King, Ross
    Publisher: Walker $ 28 ISBN: 0802714668 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPW
    The acclaimed author of Michaelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling chronicles the decade between two famous exhibitions: the scandalous Salon des Refuss in 1863, and the first Impressionist showing in 1874, set against the dramatic rise and fall of Napoleon III and the Second Empire.
    Suggested Reading: Art Stars
    Updated 12.7.05
  • Physical: An American Checkup
    Author: McManus, James
    Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374232024 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    The author negotiates the political and medical forks in the labyrinth of the country's health care system and calls for sanity and enlightenment in the stem cell research wars. It's a no-holds-barred, wrenching, but often hilarious portrait of the looming mortality of a privileged generation that can't believe the party's winding down, if not over.
    Updated 12.5.05
  • A Fool's Gold: The Unlikely Story of Lost Treasure, Stolen Marijuana and the Crazy Man of Neahkahnie Mountain
    Author: Merrit, William E.
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 23.95 ISBN: 1596910992 Date: 2006
    starBookliststarPW
    Attorney Bill Merritt's boss drops dead and before long the police are knocking at his door. One of his boss's clients faces drug charges; another wants to find treasure on Oregon's shore. How the dead lawyer, his clients, assorted law enforcement officials, and colorful hangers-on overlap and interconnect took Merritt 19 years to puzzle out.
    Updated 12.27.05
  • An Eye for an Eye
    Author: Miller, William Ian
    Publisher: Cambridge $ 28 ISBN: 0521856809 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Miller presents an original meditation on the concept of "pay back." His unique theory of justice offers redemption via retaliation. It espouses the view that revenge is a highly structured phenomenon that requires a deep commitment to balance in order to get even in a strict but fair manner.
    Updated 1.21.06
  • Second Drafts of History
    Author: Morrow, Lance
    Publisher: Basic $ 26.95 ISBN: 0465047505 Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    Morrow has developed a sterling reputation as one of the most thoughtful and insightful of contemporary writers. Here is a selection of his best essays from recent years, drawn from Time, Civilization, his online writing, and other venues.
    Updated 12.5.05
  • Love in the Time of Cholesterol: A Memoir With Recipes
    Author: Ross, Cecily
    Publisher: McGraw Hill $ 22.95 ISBN: 0071464948 Date: 2006
    starLJ
    With honesty and humor, food writer Ross tells the story of her husband's heart attack and recovery from bypass surgery, and the dramatic toll it took on their lives. In 25 chapters with two heart-friendly recipes at the end of each, Ross offers a moving account of coping with a loved one's medical issues.
    Suggested Reading: Memoirs | Cooked Books
    Updated 11.22.05
  • Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis
    Author: Stargardt, Nicholas
    Publisher: Knopf $ 30 ISBN: 1400040884 Date: 2006
    starKirkusstarPWstarBooklist
    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: All Stars | Nazis
    Updated 11.14.05
  • The Courtier and the Heretic: Lebinz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
    Author: Stewart, Matthew
    Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393058980 Date: 2006
    starPW
    In this exquisitely written philosophical romance of attraction and repulsion, greed and virtue, religion and heresy, Matthew Stewart dramatizes a titanic clash of beliefs that still continues today.
    Updated 2.28.06
  • The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai
    Author: Tayman, John
    Publisher: Scribner $ 27.50 ISBN: 074323300x Date: 2006
    starBooklist
    In the bestselling tradition of In the Heart of the Sea comes the untold history of America's only leper colony--which exists even today--and the extraordinary people forced to create a community under horrific circumstances.
    Suggested Reading: Leprosy/Hansen's Disease
    Updated 11.2.05
  • Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
    Author: Yoshino, Kenji
    Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 0375508201 Date: 2006
    starPW
    From the acclaimed Yale Law School professor, this remarkable and elegant work fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in today's culture.
    Updated 12.2.05
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