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December 4, 2005
Holiday Books
www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/books/review/notable-books2005.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
1/5
16/12/13
NATURAL HISTORY: Poems. By Dan Chiasson. (Knopf, $23.) This second collection conjures a postmodern landscape where folk knowledge and superstitions arrange into oddly moving litanies. NEVER LET ME GO. By Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf, $24.) This bold novel imagines a school where clones are trained for a terrible destiny. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. By Cormac McCarthy. (Knopf, $24.95.) Women grieve, men fight in this hard-boiled Texas noir crime novel. ON BEAUTY. Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) The author of ''White Teeth'' pounces on a place like Harvard in a cultural-politics comedy. OVERLORD: Poems. By Jorie Graham. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $22.95.) Politics and World War II, mediated by a major poet. THE PAINTED DRUM. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $25.95.) A ceremonial drum is magically linked to children and death in Erdrich's latest novel set among the Ojibwa. PLEASE DON'T COME BACK FROM THE MOON. By Dean Bakopoulos. (Harcourt, $23.) When the fathers in the Rust Belt town of this novel abandon it en masse, their sons take over. PREP. By Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $21.95.) A scholarship girl at a nifty prep school is thrust into a world of privilege in this novel. SATURDAY. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.) This novel traces a day off in the life of an English neurosurgeon who comes face to face with senseless violence. THE SEA. By John Banville. (Knopf, $23.) Banville's new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize, concerns an aging art critic mourning his wife's recent death - and his blighted life. SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. By Elliot Perlman. (Riverhead, $27.95.) An Australian novel so large in its concept of fiction's grasp on the world it takes seven narrators just to tell it. SHALIMAR THE CLOWN. By Salman Rushdie. (Random House, $25.95.) Beauty loses out as Kashmir and Rushdie's characters who live there turn brutal. SLOW MAN. By J. M. Coetzee. (Viking, $24.95.) Crippled at 60 in a car-bike accident, instructed willy-nilly by a know-it-all female novelist, Coetzee's hero studies the diminished life. STAR DUST. Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) The fastidious and the primal join in poems concerned with man as maker. THE SUCCESSOR. By Ismail Kadare. (Arcade, $24.) A whodunit tragicomedy by Albania's pre-eminent novelist, about a loyal Communist who dies before succeeding to power in that unlucky land. TOWELHEAD. By Alicia Erian. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) A bluntly erotic novel whose narrator's budding sexuality gets her driven from home. VERONICA. By Mary Gaitskill. (Pantheon, $23.) A novel that ruminates on beauty and cruelty, told by a former Paris model now sick and poor. Nonfiction THE ACCIDENTAL MASTERPIECE: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa. By Michael Kimmelman. (Penguin Press, $24.95.) A study of the unpredictable, by the chief art critic of The Times. AHMAD'S WAR, AHMAD'S PEACE: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq. By Michael Goldfarb. (Carroll & Graf, $25.95.) A memoir of a good man murdered for his decency. AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. (Knopf, $35.) The first full biography of the atom bomb's father -- rich in new revelations. ARE MEN NECESSARY? When Sexes Collide. By Maureen Dowd. (Putnam, $25.95.) The Times's twice-a-week Op-Ed columnist for the last decade expands her observations on the gender situation, from the Y chromosome up. ARMAGEDDON: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $30.) Though obviously beaten, the Germans wouldn't give up; an experienced journalist pursues the apparent paradox. THE ASSASSINS' GATE: America in Iraq. By George Packer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) The New Yorker reporter reviews the pride and ignorance he blames for the war. THE BEATLES: The Biography. By Bob Spitz. (Little, Brown, $29.95.) Spitz's broad, incisive chronicle breathes new life into the familiar story of the Liverpool boys who conquered the entertainment world. BECOMING JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey. By Linda Greenhouse. (Times Books/Holt, $25.) A Times correspondent tells how a Minnesota lawyer became the author of the Roe v. Wade decision. BEYOND GLORY: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink. By David Margolick. (Knopf, $26.95.) A heavyweight chronicle of good's symbolic clash with evil in the ring. BOSS TWEED: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York. By Kenneth D. Ackerman. (Carroll & Graf, $27.) The colorful master of graft, our greatest.
www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/books/review/notable-books2005.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print 2/5
16/12/13
BREAK, BLOW, BURN. By Camille Paglia. (Pantheon, $20.) Smart, lively essays on 43 poems, written without ego for a popular audience. BURY THE CHAINS: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. By Adam Hochschild. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.95.) How the struggle availed, especially when black Haitian armies beat white French and British ones. COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. By Jared Diamond. (Viking, $29.95.) In ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' (1997), Diamond speculated on how the world reached its present pecking order of nations; his latest book examines geographic and environmental reasons some societies have fallen apart. CONSPIRACY OF FOOLS: A True Story. By Kurt Eichenwald. (Broadway, $26.) A meticulous dissection of the rise and fall of Enron by a correspondent for The New York Times. DE KOONING: An American Master. By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. (Knopf, $35.) An exploration at length of de Kooning's life and work and their role in art's midcentury upheaval. DREAM BOOGIE: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. By Peter Guralnick. (Little, Brown, $27.95.) This exhaustive biography surrounds Cooke in the overlapping worlds of gospel, the civil rights movement and rock 'n' roll. ELIA KAZAN: A Biography. By Richard Schickel. (HarperCollins. $29.95.) The stranger-than-fiction life story of the distinguished stage and screen director. AN END TO SUFFERING: The Buddha in the World. By Pankaj Mishra. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) An intellectual autobiography: what Mishra has learned from the Buddha's legacy. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. By Charles C. Mann. (Knopf, $30.) This sweeping portrait of pre-Columbian civilization argues that it was far more populous and sophisticated than previously thought. FREAKONOMICS: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Morrow, $25.95.) A maverick scholar and a journalist apply economic thinking to everything from sumo wrestlers who cheat to legalized abortion and the falling crime rate. GARBAGE LAND: On the Secret Trail of Trash. By Elizabeth Royte. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A chronicle of the weird stuff that happens to what we discard. THE GLASS CASTLE: A Memoir. By Jeannette Walls. (Scribner, $25.) Walls and her three sibs, dragged all over the country by damaged parents, thought it a glorious adventure. Tough kids. A GREAT IMPROVISATION: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. By Stacy Schiff. (Holt, $30.) A wise account of Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic brilliance, revealed in Paris at 70. IN COMMAND OF HISTORY: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War. By David Reynolds. (Random House, $35.) How a very busy man and a staff of busy assistants managed to turn out six volumes in 1948-54. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU: Restless Genius. By Leo Damrosch. (Houghton Mifflin, $30.) A life of the self-taught Swiss who proclaimed the noble savage and denounced conventional social distinctions. JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. By Richard Parker. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The career of a public intellectual, ambassador and aphorist. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City. By Jonathan Mahler. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A narrative that captures New York City's about-face from rot to rehab. THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOWELL. Edited by Saskia Hamilton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) Confessions, opinions and other people's secrets animate these missives from a fine poet. LINCOLN'S MELANCHOLY. By Joshua Wolf Shenk. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) In an era before the relentless good cheer and glad-handing of modern politicians, Lincoln passed through shadows to triumph. THE LOST PAINTING. By Jonathan Harr. (Random House, $24.95.) The adventures of Caravaggio's ''Taking of Christ,'' painted in 1602, rediscovered by scholar-hunters in 1990. MADE IN DETROIT: A South of 8-Mile Memoir. By Paul Clemens. (Doubleday, $23.95.) Clemens (born in 1973) recalls growing up working-class white in a black city losing both people and jobs. MAO: The Unknown Story. By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. (Knopf, $35.) A huge, meticulously researched biography that paints Chairman Mao in authentic Hitler-Stalin 20th-century hues. MARK TWAIN: A Life. By Ron Powers. (Free Press, $35.) A wise and lively biography of an American paradox, always lively, rarely wise. MATISSE THE MASTER: A Life of Henri Matisse. The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954. By Hilary Spurling. (Knopf, $40.) The final volume of a huge, careful study of a 20th-century wizard. MIRROR TO AMERICA: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)A riveting and bitterly candid memoir by a seminal African-American scholar, raised and educated in an era of stifling race prejudice.
www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/books/review/notable-books2005.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print 3/5
16/12/13
NEW ART CITY. By Jed Perl. (Knopf, $35.) The art critic of The New Republic explores heroic Abstract Expressionism and its cool, empirical successors in New York. NIGHT DRAWS NEAR: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War. By Anthony Shadid. (Holt, $26.) An Arabic-speaking reporter on life in the Red Zone, outside American control. OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL. By Sean Wilsey. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) A coming-of-age memoir by a writer so skillful his account of his sufferings as a rich kid never becomes insufferable. OMAHA BLUES: A Memory Loop. By Joseph Lelyveld. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A memoir of a complicated childhood by a former executive editor of The Times. 102 MINUTES: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers. By Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. (Times Books/Holt, $26.) A skilled reconstruction by writers of The Times. THE ORIENTALIST: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. By Tom Reiss. (Random House, $25.95.) The bold writer and impostor Lev Nussimbaum (Kurban Said) (Essad Bey) and his lives from 1905 to 1942. OUR INNER APE: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. By Frans de Waal. (Riverhead, $24.95.) De Waal addresses the similarities between humans and their closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees. POSTWAR: A History of Europe Since 1945. By Tony Judt. (Penguin Press, $39.95.) An inquiry into why the condition of Europe is so much better than anyone would have dared hope in 1945. THE PRINCE OF THE CITY: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life. By Fred Siegel with Harry Siegel. (Encounter, $26.95.) Giuliani seen as the Machiavellian prophet of an alternative urban policy and as an eligible president. THE RISE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Jefferson to Lincoln. By Sean Wilentz. (Norton, $35.) A clear, readable and monumental narrative work of scholarship, full of rich detail. THE RIVER OF DOUBT: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. By Candice Millard. (Doubleday, $26.) A vibrant retelling of Roosevelt's postelection expedition through the Rio da Dvida; what was supposed to be a well-provisioned safari became instead a survey of an uncharted capillary of the Amazon. 1776. By David McCullough. (Simon & Schuster, $32.) A lively work that skewers Washington's pretensions and admires citizen soldiers. SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife. By Mary Roach. (Norton, $24.95.) A diligent, cheerful account of efforts to learn whether science can show that there is (or isn't) life after death. THE SURVIVOR. By John F. Harris. (Random House, $29.95.) An assessment of Bill Clinton's performance in the White House; by a reporter for The Washington Post. A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS. By Amos Oz. (Harcourt, $26.) A memoir by the Israeli novelist, mourning the death of his mother long ago and the demise of the socialist Zion in his own time. TEAM OF RIVALS: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) An elegant, incisive study of Lincoln through his relationships with his former political rivals turned cabinet members. THE TENDER BAR: A Memoir. By J. R. Moehringer. (Hyperion, $23.95.) As an only child abandoned by his father, the author found an adoptive family in a Long Island bar (now defunct). THEATRE OF FISH: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador. By John Gimlette. (Knopf, $25.) Gimlette explores the provincial psyche by journeying through the barren regions whose chief resource, fish, has departed. TULIA: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town. By Nate Blakeslee. (PublicAffairs, $26.95.) How 38 people, mostly black, were convicted of grave drug charges on virtually no evidence but the word of a single cop. VINDICATION: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. By Lyndall Gordon. (HarperCollins, $29.95.) A biography of the brilliant early feminist. A WAR LIKE NO OTHER: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. By Victor Davis Hanson. (Random House, $29.95.) The fate of Athens, the superpower of its day, after it tried to export its political system to the rest of the Greek world. WARPED PASSAGES: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. By Lisa Randall. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.95.) From a Harvard physicist, advanced cosmological theories for lay folk who are a bit baffled by the idea of 10 dimensions. WITHOUT APOLOGY: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Random House, $24.95.) Cohen thoughtfully tracks girls' boxing till she herself is converted to pugilism. WODEHOUSE: A Life. By Robert McCrum. (Norton, $27.95.) The prolific, industrious creator of Jeeves and oh so many dear others. THE WORLD IS FLAT: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. By Thomas L. Friedman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.50.) The New York Times columnist maps the next phase of globalization as technological forces level the world's economic playing field. THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING. By Joan Didion. (Knopf, $23.95.) A powerful, persuasive account of the crisis of mortality after the sudden
www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/books/review/notable-books2005.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print 4/5
16/12/13
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www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/books/review/notable-books2005.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
5/5