CRITICS' CHOICE BOOKS

The New York Times

A Gate at the Stairs
by Laurie Moore

"Great writers usually present us with mysteries, but the mystery Lorrie Moore presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once —" unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She's a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one. On finishing "A Gate at the Stairs" I turned to the reader nearest to me and made her swear to read it immediately (well, the dog was between us, but she doesn't read much, and none of what I recommend). I might even urge it on my dissenting friend."

- Jonathan Lethem

The Anthologist
by Nicholson Baker

"...Nicholson Baker has written a novel about poetry that's actually about poetry — and that is also startlingly perceptive and ardent, both as a work of fiction and as a representation of the kind of thinking that poetry readers do."

- David Orr

Strength In What Remains
by David Orr

"This account of a medical student's escape from the slaughter in Burundi in 1994, his precarious existence in New York and his eventual return home may be Kidder's finest book to date."

Hardcover • Biography • $26.00

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The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
by Annette Gordon-Reed

"Joseph Ellis, a Jefferson scholar ... called Ms. Gordon-Reed's book 'the best study of a slave family ever written.'"

- Patricia Cohen

Lush Life
by Richard Price

"Chandler—and Bellow, too—peeps out from Price's novel, in which an aspiring writer cum restaurant manager, mugged in the gentrifying lower east side of Manhattan, himself becomes a suspect."

- New York Times Notable Books of 2008

Once the Shore: Stories
by Paul Yoon

"Yoon's prose is spare and beautiful. He can describe the sea more ways than seem possible without losing freshness, and his characters' world is often quite dazzling."

- Joan Silber

A Short History of Women: A Novel
by Kate Walbert

"Yoon's prose is spare and beautiful. He can describe the sea more ways than seem possible without losing freshness, and his characters' world is often quite dazzling."

- Leah Hager Cohen

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonies, and Other Adventures in Early America
by Tony Horwitz

"An accessible popular history of early America, with plenty of self-tutoring and colorful reporting."

- New York Times Notable Books of 2008

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
by Steven Millhauser

"In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo-kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister 'laugh parties'; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that 'under this world there is another, waiting to be born.'"

Paperback • Fiction • $14.95

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A Mercy
by Toni Morrison

"The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel—part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song—about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison's farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison—an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears."

Paperback • Fiction • $15.00

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Netherland: A Novel
by Joseph O'Neill

"O'Neill's seductive ode to New York—a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief 'in its salvific worth'—is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations."

Paperback • Fiction • $14.95
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2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolaño
translantion by Natasha Wimmer

"Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters—European literary scholars, an African- American journalist and more—whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered."

Paperback • Fiction • $18.00

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Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri

"There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modernday Bengali-Americans—many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can't quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters—young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding—in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord."

Paperback • Fiction • $12.00

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The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
by Jane Mayer

"Mayer's meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush's antiterrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantanamo Bay, 'extraordinary rendition,' 'enhanced' interrogation methods, 'black sites,' warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation's history."

Paperback • US History & Politics • $15.95

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The Forever War
by Dexter Flkins

"The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the 'war on terror.'"

Paperback • Military History: Gulf Wars • $12.00

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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust

"The most surprising word in this biography is 'authorized.' Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist's command of story and character, and he patiently connects his subject's brilliant oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life."

Paperback • Miltary History: Civil War • $15.95

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The Washington Post

Rebirth of a Nation
by Jackson Lears

"Rebirth of a Nation" is dazzling cultural history: smart, provocative and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful and filled with humane, just and peaceful possibilities."

- Charles Postel, June 28, 2009

Age Of Wonder: How The Romantic Generation Discovered The Beauty And Terror Of Science
by Richard Holmes

Hardcover • Science Technology Hist & Theory • $40.00

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Cold: Adventures In The World's Frozen Places
by Bill Streever

Hardcover • Atmospheric Science • $24.99

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Home
by Marilynne Robinson

Paperback • Fiction • $11.20

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American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work
by Nick Taylor

"A succinct survey of the Great Depression and particularly its consequences for workers."

- H.W. Brands

Dangerous Games: The Uses And Abuses Of History
by Margaret MacMillan

Paperback • General History & Politics • $22.00

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The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
by James Gustave Speth

"A thoughtful diagnosis of the root causes of planetary distress."

- Ross Gelbspan

The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
by Leonard Susskind

"As good an introduction as you're going to find to the strange world of black hole astrophysics. A great read."

- James Trefil

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
by Neil Shubin

"Describes a fossil named Tiktaalik ('large freshwater fish' in Inuit) and conveys its significance with both precision and exuberance."

- Barbara J. King

Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America
by Donna Foote

"The most interesting account of inner-city high school life in many years."

- Jay Mathews

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner

"A grump spends a year visiting the world's most and least happy places."

- Daniel Gilbert

Hardcover • Travel Literature • $13.99
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BusinessWeek

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in a Interconnected World
by Jacqueline Novogratz

"Novogratz is passionate about the need to ease global poverty, but she is no starry-eyed idealist. Her stories of working with some of the world's poorest people back her case for a pragmatic, enterprise-based approach to solving poverty. Novogratz is often entertaining, recounting the tale of an impromptu dance-off with women after her car broke down in a rainstorm. At the same time, she can be a brutal self-critic, particularly as she describes stepping away from her American upbringing to learn the culture and way of life in Africa."

- Helen Walters

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
by William D. Cohan

"[Y]ou should personally dog-ear a copy of William D. Cohan's House of Cards, so far the definitive work on how the "Bear Stearns cancer had metastasized and spread throughout the world." Cohan, a 17-year Wall Street veteran and the author of an illuminating history of Lazard Fr�res (LAZ), The Last Tycoons, vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86-year-old brokerage house and then the entire economy."

- Roben Fazard

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder

"Buffett's secret: focus. 'He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business,' says the author, including 'art, literature, science, travel, [and] architecture.' Schroeder also provides a vivid picture of the Buffett family, including the investor's two wives and his inflexible father. The Snowball is an astute, and at times riveting, read—especially now."

- Amy Feldman

The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs
by Charles D. Ellis

"The author provides a wealth of colorful detail: For example, here are Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Chief Executive Henry Paulson and Jon Corzine, the former co-CEO and now New Jersey Governor, squabbling 'like teenaged kids,' in the words of one colleague. The Partnership is a juicy, vivid chronicle."

Hardcover • Business: General • $37.95

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Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely

"Behavioral economics is a major trend, and one of the more successful recent works in the genre is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Dan Ariely. The author illustrates his thesis—that real people are impulsive, short-sighted, and far from coldly rational—with ingenious experiments. The book is 'an entertaining tour of the many ways in which people act against their best interests.'"

- Peter Coy

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives
by Michael Heller

"The Columbia University law professor explores how fragmented property ownership-whether in land, intellectual property, or the broadcast spectrum-too often allows people to block each other from optimizing a scarce resource."

Hardcover • Economics • $26.00

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NPR

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
by Daniyal Mueenuddin

"I can't praise Mueenuddin's work too much: He has the gifts of insight into human behavior of Alice Munro, the gift for detail we find in Updike and William Trevor, and the ability to make sentences and paragraphs that pack the punch of something out of James Salter and Richard Ford."

- Alan Cheuse, NPR

Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town
by Warren St. John

"I feel a little ridiculous suggesting that if you only read one book over the next few months, it should be Outcasts United. But if you only read one book over the next few months, it should be Outcasts United."

-Bill Littlefield

Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Perfect Recipes for Each
by Sheila Lukins

"The truth is, a lot of us aren't that different from my 7-year-old, who could happily eat pork every night. Some things are just so good—burgers, spring asparagus, pasta, tomatoes—that no matter how often you have them, they're worth getting to know better."

Paperback • Cookbook: General • $19.95

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The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio's Award-Winning Food Show
by Lynne Rossetto Kasper And Sally Swift

"Should cooking shows be heard rather than seen? Step aside, Food Network. This year's Best Book Based on a Cooking Show award goes to radio's own Splendid Table."

Hardcover • Cookbook: General • $35.00

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How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition): 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food
by Mark Bittman

"For a guy who's made his reputation stripping things down to their bare essentials, Mark 'the Minimalist' Bittman has built a sprawling empire: print, TV, and more than a dozen books. He hardly needs my stamp of approval, but the update of HTCE is just too good to pass up. It's not that there was anything wrong with the old one, but this one's a triumph of organization."

Hardcover • Cookbook: General • $35.00

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660 Curries: The Gateway to Indian Cooking
by Raghavan Iyer

"I never open this book without being struck by the diversity, comprehensiveness and sheer size, which led me to call it 'the best 3-pound paperback of the year' in an earlier review. Don't be fooled by the title—these are no more the orange, gluey curries you might have encountered in the 70s than Google is a card catalog."

Paperback • Cookbook: International • $22.95

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Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Vietnamese Recipes from the Heart
by Pauline Nguyen and Luke Nguyen

"I'm not sure there is a craving that is more urgent than the craving for pho, the Vietnamese beef soup. The broth is deep, clear and complex, and it tastes like it took a whole day to make it. The bad news is, it did. The good news is, you can now learn to do it yourself if you really want to, thanks to the astonishing Secrets of the Red Lantern."

Hardcover • Cookbook: International • $40.00

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Baked: New Frontiers in Baking
by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito
Photography by Tina Rupp

"...the first thing that caught my eye on opening their book was the booze, which seemed to be everywhere: Chocolate stout milkshake, bourbon chocolate pecan pie, espresso martini, grasshopper cake with creme de menthe. On closer inspection, the recipes proved, if not always alcoholic, uniformly intoxicating. It's not so much the kick of spirits as their untamed, anything-but-vanilla flavor that this book pursues so vivaciously."

Hardcover • Cookbook: Baking • $29.95

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L.A. Times

Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon

"Inherent Vice" may not be the Great American Novel, but it's certainly a Great American Read -- a terrific pastiche of California noir, wonderfully amusing throughout (and hard to quote from in a family newspaper because of the frequent use of, uh, colorful spoken language) and a poignant evocation of the last flowering of the '60s, just before everything changed and passed into myth or memory:..."

- Michael Dirda

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees
by Roger Deakin

"Can someone tell me why old-fashioned naturalists write so beautifully and present-day environmentalists write so badly? Roger Deakin's writing is teeming with creation. Bluebells, badgers, cow parsley, hazel, hedgerows, foxglove, rooks, robins and small-leaved limes - this is pagan England, land of Celts and fairies. "Wildwood" is about wood. Trees, yes, those in his backyard and beyond, but also the enduring uses of wood, the many ways we live with wood - heat, chairs, cricket bats, artists who work in wood."

- Susan Salter Reynolds

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann

"In The Lost City of Z, New Yorker staff writer Grann expands his 2005 feature for that magazine, illuminating Col. Percy Fawcett's doomed trek into the Amazon searching for the lost civilization that he dubbed Z. Fawcett counts not just among the formerly obsessed but also as part of current legend: his remains have yet to be found since he disappeared in 1925, his life reportedly inspired the creation of the character Indiana Jones, and copycat efforts have led to more than 100 known deaths..."

- Karla Starr

Wanting
by Richard Flanagan

"In "Wanting," Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms -- that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love."

- Jon Fasman

Natural History Magazine

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
by Gordon Hempton & John Grossmann

"In this deeply personal call to action, Hempton seems to be sending a message to the next generation: Turn down the volume, shut off the engines, and simply listen. 'Silence is not the absence of something,' he writes, 'but the presence of everything.'"

- Critic's Choice

An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds
by Jonathan Silvertown

"...a little gem of science writing that deserves a spot on any natural history lover's bedside bookstand. To be sure it may help you make small talk at a convention of palynologisits or Burpee Seed salesmen, but, at its root, it is simply a delight to read."

-Critic's Choice

New York Review of Books

Man in the Dark: A Novel
by Paul Aster

"...Man in the Dark is an undoubted pleasure to read. Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter. ...Ultimately, Auster reminds us that each of us looks at existence through story-colored lenses. The world we inhabit is literally shaped by Story..."

- Michael Dirda

Secret Garden Books

Little Bee
by Chris Cleave

"This is one of the most beautifully wrought pieces of fiction I've read in years. Cinematic in its staging, and nothing short of magical in the emotional unfolding of its plot, I was greatly moved by the book, and could think of nothing else for weeks afterward. The voice of the English protagonist is a marvel of warts-and-all personhood, but it is the voice of the Nigerian protagonist, Little Bee, which is the main achievement."

- Suzanne Perry

Stanford University

The Last Indian War: The Nez Pearc Story
by Elliot West

"No one has ever told the story of the Nez Perce so compellingly and so movingly-and many have told it. Even more impressively, West makes this wry, tragic, and deeply humane volume a window onto the wider changes transforming the United States. His idea of a Greater Reconstruction provides a framework for future histories of the era."

- Richard White

Village Voice

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
by Andrei Codrescu

"A hard-edged, rapier-like volume, perfect for sliding into a back pocket of skinny hipster pants or stabbing into the complacent underbelly of bourgeois (or bourgeois-bohemian) society. Authored by NPR commentator and essayist Andrei Codrescu, it offers a headier-than-usual tour of the early-1900s avant-garde, sprinkled with sex appeal for the would-be MySpace-age revolutionary."

- Eli Epstein-Deutsh

The Guardian

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
by Mark Thompson

"Thompson's account of all this is original, masterly and definitive. He has not only read everything about the subject, he has also tramped the battlefields and talked to centenarian survivors. His descriptions of the gore, guts and filth of attrition in a petrified wilderness are vivid and terrible. His character sketches are penetrating and precise. His judgments are incisive. He is particularly good on literary aspects of the war, delicately anatomizing, for example, the work of Italy's foremost war poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, which 'burst like starlight from violence."

- Piers Brendon

Bookforum

Dancing in the Dark : A Cultural History of the Great Depression
by Morris Dickstein

"Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression is a sweeping, stirring, disturbing, and more thatn occasionally thrilling account of a period unsettlingly like our own."

- Joan Richardson, September 2009

Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel

"If you are anything like me, you will finish Wolf Hall wishing it were twice as long as its 560 pages. Torn away from this sixteenth century world, in which you have come to know the engaging, pragmatic Cromwell as is he were you own brother - as if he were yourself - you will turn to the Internet to find out more about him...You will, I suspect, read each new piece of information about Tudor England with fresh and sharpened eyes. But none of this, however instructive, will make up for your feeling of loss, because none of this additional material will come clothed in the seductive, inimitable language of Mantel's great fiction."

- Wendy Lesser, September 2009

Love and Summer
by William Trevor

"While many feel 2007's Cheating at Canasta is Trevor's finest story collection to date, his skill as a novelist may now have exceeded his mastery of the story. Love and Summer is his most fully realized novel; there is no hint of a short story buried within. And Trevor's enduring theme has never been more clearly expressed: Evil is not so much banal as banality is evil."

- Allen Barra, September 2009