Library Journal

Binelli, Mark. Detroit City Is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. Holt. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780805092295. $28; eISBN 9781429974615. SOCIAL SCIENCE
For most Americans, Detroit epitomizes contemporary urban blight. Here, native son and Rolling Stone contributing editor Binelli shows that while Detroit may be down it’s not out. In fact, current developments—organic farming on empty lots, a realignment plan to shift residents from desolate neighborhoods to a vibrant new center—suggest how not just Detroit but all troubled cities can rise again. Expect good writing on a freighted topic.

Coddington, Grace. Grace. Random. Nov. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780812993356. $30; eISBN 9780679645214. CD/Downloadable: Random House Audio. MEMOIR
Stunning British model. Then creative director of British Vogue. Then head of Calvin Klein’s operations in New York. Then creative director of American Vogue. And true star of the 2009 documentary The September Issue, in which she famously upstaged Anna Wintour. Here’s a memoir about Coddington’s 40 years in fashion, beautifully designed by the author herself. Go, fashionistas!

Fellowes, Jessica & Matthew Sturgis. The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era for Family, Friends, Lovers and Staff. St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781250027627. $29.99; eISBN 9781250027634. TELEVISION
Former deputy editor of Country Life and niece of lead Downton Abbey author Julian Fellowes, Fellowes has already written about the public television phenomenon in The World of Downton Abbey. Here she returns with critic/author Sturgis to give an official preview of Season 3, which launches on PBS in January 2013. Downtown Abbey fever does not appear to be abating (though not yet commissioned, Seasons 4 and 5 are in discussion), so this should be popular.

Fornatale, Peter & Bernard M. Corbett. 50 Licks: An Album’s Worth of Stories from the 50-Year History of the Rolling Stones. Bloomsbury USA, dist. by Macmillan. Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781608199211. pap. $17. MUSIC
Fifty years, 50 cool stories (or “Licks”), each named for a different Rolling Stones song, and often drawn from previously unavailable material. FM rock pioneer Fortanale, who died on April 26, joined with Corbett—the radio voice of Harvard University football and a lifelong Rolling Stones nut—to deliver another celebratory piece on the Band That Played On…and On.

Greene, Robert. Mastery. Viking. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780670024964. $28.95; Downloadable: Penguin Audio. PSYCHOLOGY
Want to be the master of your universe? Greene shows you how by looking at the folks who have done it before you, from middling-student Charles Darwin to Temple Grandin, Henry Ford, and more. Since Greene’s books (e.g., The 48 Laws of Power) have sold more than a million copies, he must have something to say to folks out there. Be prepared.

Kelley, Kitty. Capturing Camelot: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the Kennedys. Thomas Dunne Bks: St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780312643423. $29.99; eISBN 9781250018830. PHOTOGRAPHY
Assigned by United Press International to cover John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, Stanley Tretick became friendly enough with the candidate that he was given access to the White House once Kennedy was elected. He took many pictures readers will recognize immediately, often of JFK with his family. But of course never-before-seen shots are here, too. Best-selling author Kelley, a friend of Tretick, provides an upbeat text. Big publicity push.

Lil Wayne. Gone Till November. Grand Central. Nov. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781455515264. $25.99. MEMOIR
Rapper Lil Wayne has won four Grammies and sold millions of albums; he also did time in Rikers Island Penitentiary in 2010 for criminal possession of a weapon. Here are the journals he kept at the time, reportedly smart, detailed, and thoughtful. Since he has five million Twitter followers and 33.7 million Facebook fans (decidedly the biggest numbers I’ve keyed in for those venues), this book will have an audience.

Love, Courtney & Anthony Bozza. Untitled. Morrow. Nov. 2012. 464p. ISBN 9780062127952. $29.99. eISBN 9780062127990. MEMOIR
These rock memoirs just keep coming. Now the contrarian, controversial Love, loved and hated by the media (and the rest of us), widow of Kurt Cobain and a scalding musician in her own right, tells her own story. With a 250,000-copy first printing and author appearances in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle (but not Portland?).

Mount, Jane (illus.). & Thessaly La Force (ed). My Ideal Bookshelf. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780316200905. $24.99. LITERATURE
If you’re like me, you judge people by what’s on their bookshelves. Here’s a book that lets you see what folks like Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark Bittman, Patti Smith, and more have stashed on theirs. Each contributor weighs in on his or her favorites (“There’s no cumulative purpose—it’s just an excellent way to waste your life,” says Jonathan Lethem), and Mount provides whimsical drawings of side-by-side spines. Sweet.

Nelson, Willie & Kinky Friedman. The Troublemaker: A Story of Faith, Redemption, and Staying True to Your Deepest Beliefs. Morrow. Nov. 2012. 192p. ISBN 9780062193643. $22.99; eISBN 9780062193650. lrg. prnt. MEMOIR
Nelson is such a famed singer/songwriter/activist that next year Austin will place an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of him on Willie Nelson Boulevard. Meanwhile, here’s a memoir cum inspirational tale—and just right for the holidays. With his career stuttering and his personal life in shreds, Nelson wasn’t facing the greatest Christmas in 1971. Even his house burned down. So he decided to change everything, shrugging off pressures to sound Nashville and heading in a new creative direction that landed him where he is today. With a 125,000-copy first printing; note the large print, not surprisingly since this hardy 78-year-old has some mature fans.

Scottoline, Lisa & Francesca Serritella. Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim. St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780312640088. $25.99; eISBN 9781250025074. CD: Macmillan Audio. RELATIONSHIPS
Scottoline is doing so well with her juicily acerbic essays collections, particularly those written with daughter Serritella, that one wonders whether they will start taking precedence over her best-selling fiction. Here, mother and daughter deal with separation anxiety of an adult sort, as Serritella moves to the big city, Scottoline looks about her suburban empty nest, and both think about shifting boundaries. Cozy.

Standiford, Les. Desperate Sons: The Secret Band of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War. Harper: HarperCollins. Nov. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780061899553. $27.99; eISBN 9780062218124. HISTORY
This chronicle of the Sons of Liberty in the American Revolution is billed as a political thriller, so expect excitement. Author of the best-selling Bringing Adam Home, Standiford goes behind the glossy surface of iconic events like the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s midnight gallop to explain how dangerous (and admittedly illegal) they really were. His aim: to show that we are more bound together by the chances these “desperate Sons” took than divided by the petty politics of today. Well, we can hope.

Tapper, Jake. The Outpost: The Untold Story of American Valor. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 608p. ISBN 9780316185394. $28.99. CD/downloadable: Hachette Audio. CURRENT EVENTS
After Combat Outpost Keating was abandoned, the Pentagon determined that the camp, located in the desolate mountains of Afghanistan just 14 miles from the Pakistan border, should never have been established. But first came the October 3, 2009, attack by nearly 400 Taliban fighters, which the 53 U.S. troops held off at considerable cost. A senior White House correspondent for ABC News, Tapper did hard investigate work to understand how this fiasco came about. Lots of buzz about Tapper as a rising media star.

Barofsky, Neil.  Bailout: How I Watched Washington Rescue Wall Street While Abandoning Main Street. Free Pr: S. & S. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781451684933. $26.  CURRENT EVENTS
In 2008, Barofsky was appointed Special United States Treasury Department Inspector General to oversee the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But he resigned his post in 2011, citing family reasons. Not a lot of word on the contents of this book, but the title says it all.

Criss, Peter. Makeup to Breakup. Scribner. Oct. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781451620825. $26. MEMOIR
Wow, the musicians are really talking. Last week I featured memoirs from Billy Ray Cyrus, Kenny Rogers, John Taylor, Pete Townshend, and Neil Young, and note the Cyndi Lauper tell-all below. Here, founding KISS drummer Criss spills all about his painted band and his own version of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.

Crothers, Tim. The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster. Scribner. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781451657814. $26. BIOGRAPHY/GAMES
At age 11, Phiona Mutesi had a lot of strikes against her; barely literate, she lived in the worst slums of Kampala, Uganda. Then a slum dweller who had become a missionary taught her to play chess, and three years later she was an international champion. Basing this book on his National Magazine Award–nominated story, Sports Illustrated senior writer Crothers tells a story that isn’t just inspirational but a corrective to our most damning assumptions.

Denby, David. Do the Movies Have a Future? S. & S. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781416599470. $27. FILM
These collected essays from the noted New Yorker critic don’t just talk about movies; they talk more broadly about where the movie business is going. As art is squeezed out by the car-crash mentality and digitization takes over, perhaps the whole business—which has long furnished America’s most popular form of entertainment—will end up dead. Here, too, are discussions of Denby’s favorite directors and the great critics James Agee and Pauline Kael. Essential for film fans.

Feinstein, Michael. The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in Twelve Songs. S. & S. Oct. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781451645309. $45 with CD. BIOGRAPHY/MUSIC
Ambassador of the Great American Songbook, as he’s called, Feinstein lucked out at age 20 when he got a job with Ira Gershwin. Here he shares both reminiscences of their six-year partnership and his unique insights into the glory that is George Gershwin’s music. When it comes to the great Gershwins, I’m not the only person to proclaim “Love Is Here To Stay,” and Feinstein’s structuring of his narrative in terms of 12 key songs is intriguing. Can’t wait to hear the accompanying CD.

Han Han. This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver). S. & S. Oct. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781451660005. $23. MEMOIR/CURRENT EVENTS
After Han dropped out of high school, he wrote a novel titled Triple Door that has sold more than 20 million copies, then went on to become a singer, a sharp-tongued blogger of the moment, and a star on the rally racing circuit. Now he’s an international celebrity who’s changed our view of China, and his observations here range from racing to patriotism. Seriously, this sounds cool.

Lauper, Cyndi with Jancee Dunn. Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir. Atria: S. & S. Oct. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781439147856. $28.99. MEMOIR/MUSIC
For girls (and others) who want to have fun: a memoir from Lauper, who’s sold more than 30 million albums globally and has been nominated for a stack of awards, including 14 Grammys. She starts here with her tough early years, when she abandoned home at age 17 and survived by her wits—and doing things like cleaning a Hare Krishna temple for free food. Then come the glories and (inevitable) hardships of fame.

McMurtry, Larry. Custer. S. & S. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781451626209. $40. BIOGRAPHY
McMurtry on George Armstrong Custer; now that should be larger than life. With no cavalry survivors and only scattered Indian accounts after Custer and his 7th Cavalry attacked a large Lakota Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, it’s hard to say what really happened on that hot June day in 1876. But McMurtry’s chronicle of the man should be colorful—for one thing, there are 150 four-color illustrations.

Nepo, Mark. Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred. Free Pr: S. & S. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781451674668. $25. INSPIRATION
You’ll know cancer survivor Nepo from his No. 1 New York Times best seller, The Book of Awakening—not to mention his appearances on Good Morning America and Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday program (OWN TV). Emphasizing our relationships to wisdom, experience, and one another, he here uses his own hearing loss to explain how we can return daily to what really matters in life.

Pantsov, Alexander V. & Steven I. Levine. Mao: The Real Story. S. & S. Oct. 2012. 736p. ISBN 9781451654479. $35. BIOGRAPHY
Moscow-born Pantsov, now a history professor at Capital University and author of books like The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927, joins with China politics and foreign affairs expert Levine to craft a biography of one of the towering leaders/monsters of the 20th century. Key here is access to Russian documents not available to previous researchers. Interesting to see where this goes, since as China rises and rises, a new Mao biography seems important.

Schwarzenegger, Arnold. Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story. S. & S. Oct. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9781451662436. $32.50. CD: S. & S. Audio. MEMOIR
Body-building champion. Movie star. Governor of California. And immigrant. Schwarzenegger presents his life story as the realization of the American dream. Long on his achievements, then (note the subtitle), but he’s also said to be honest about his regrets—and that would pique reader interest. With a national tour.

Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956. Doubleday. Oct. 2012. 640p. ISBN 9780385515696. $35; eISBN 9780385536431. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORY
Slate and Washington Post columnist Applebaum won a Pulitzer for Gulag, so you can bet that a lot of folks will be anticipating her next book. Here she explains how the Soviet Union, suddenly in control of Eastern Europe after World War II, turned those countries into communist regimes and what life was then like for citizens who often found the new ideology utterly alien. Applebaum not only dug into newly opened archives but conducted interviews, which should give this book a personal feel. Exciting!

Bastianich, Lidia Matticchio & Tanya Bastianich Manuali. Lidia’s Favorite Recipes: 100 Foolproof Italian Dishes, from Basic Sauces to Irresistible Entrées. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780307595669. $24.95; eISBN 9780307960856. COOKBOOKS
Lidia Bastianich has famously written eight cookbooks, five accompanied by nationally syndicated public television series. Here, she again joins forces with daughter Tanya, an Oxford Ph.D. in renaissance art whose travel company arranges art and culinary tours of Italy. They’re aiming for a truly reader-friendly book, with a lower price point and more compact size than the previous titles. But I’m betting that you’ll find the same old Bastianich quality.

Berkus, Nate. The Things That Matter. Spiegel & Grau. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780679644316. $35; eISBN 9780679644323. MEMOIR/INTERIOR DESIGN
Made famous by Oprah, star of his own talk show (just wrapping its second and last season), author of the best-selling Home Rules, and, coincidentally, an executive producer of The Help, Berkus is one hot designer. This book, partly a memoir about his rocketing success after founding a design firm in the mid-1990s at age 24, also talks about design precepts and “the things that matter”—the beautiful things he surrounds himself with that remind him of who and what he has loved and where he wants to go next. With a four-city tour to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; the media opportunities here are huge.

The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. Random. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780679644750. $40; eISBN 9780679644767. PETS
Essays, short humor, poems, fiction, and cartoons! By Malcolm Gladwell, Ian Frazier, John Updike, Susan Orlean, Arthur Miller, E.B. White, and more! All from The New Yorker! And all about dogs! (Don’t worry, aurilophiles, cats are up next.) 

Brzezinski, Matthew. Isaac’s Army: The Jewish Resistance in Occupied Poland. Random. Oct. 2012. 544p. ISBN 9780553807271. $30; eISBN 9780679645306. HISTORY
Yes, the Jews fought back during World War II, and journalist/author Brzezinski chronicles one telling example: an underground movement in Poland masterminded by Isaac Zuckerman, only in his twenties at the time. Based in the Warsaw Ghetto, the movement sent couriers throughout the country, protecting Jews while battling the Gestapo. All its members escaped through the sewers during the Ghetto Uprising, ultimately surviving the war and helping to smuggle Jews to Palestine; Brzezinski was able to interview many movement members for his book. One story of derring-do that really, really matters.     

Coleman, David G. The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis; The Secret White House Tapes. Norton. Oct. 2012. ISBN 9780393084412. $25.95. HISTORY
On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba, effectively ending the Cuban Missile Crisis. Or so we have always thought. In fact, as secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers, and Soviet troops remained in Cuba after that date, with Kennedy carefully negotiating to get as many of them out as possible within setting off the pugnacious Khrushchev. Director of the Miller Center’s Presidential Recording Program, Coleman has the goods.

Henken, Priscilla J. Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright. Norton. Oct. 2012. 192p. ISBN 9780393733808. $34.95. MEMOIR/ARCHITECTURE
With husband David, Henken lived at Taliesin as part of the Fellowship, the architectural community that worshipfully surrounded Frank Lloyd Wright from the 1930s to the 1950s. Her diary, covering 1942–43, captures not only Wright at his height but an entire movement, spiritual as well as aesthetic, and the conflicts within the community. For smart readers.

Hitz, Alex. My Beverly Hills Kitchen: Classic Southern Cooking with a French Twist. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780307701527. $35; eISBN 9780307960948. COOKBOOKS
Red-Pepper Tart? Salted Caramel Cake? This is not your standard Southern cooking, though Hitz draws inspiration from his Deep South roots (raised in Atlanta, he was a partner in the city’s famed Patio by the River restaurant). Then he mixes it up with what he learned about cooking in France to create…la nourriture au réconfort? Good cooks will know Hitz’s luxury prepared foods line, The Beverly Hills Kitchen, which he promotes on his top-ranked HSN show of the same name. With a six-city tour to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Kurzweil, Ray. How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Viking. Oct. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780670025299. $27.95. SCIENCE
New York Times best-selling author (The Singularity Is Near), National Medal of Technology winner, and former LJ columnist (note that he was keynote speaker at LJ’s first virtual ebook summit), Kurzweil here explains reverse engineering the brain. It’s a project to understand how the brain works, how the mind emerges from it, and what this means for our understanding of intelligence, human or machine. So that you can stay cutting edge; with a nine-city tour.

London, Stacy. The Truth About Style. Viking. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780670026234. $32.95. FASHION
Preteen psoriasis left London physically scarred and emotionally burdened, and later she endured bouts of anorexia and then binge eating that promptly doubled her weight. So the cohost of TLC’s What Not To Wear understands that how we feel about ourselves affects all our choices, including what we wear; our worst fashion don’ts often stem from deep-down crisis. Here, she helps us see the crisis, deflect those choices, and develop a style all our own. I’m already looking in the mirror….

O’Reilly, Bill & Martin Dugard. Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot. Holt. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780805096668. $28. HISTORY
O’Reilly, who presides over the highest-rated cable news show in the country, had a best seller with Killing Lincoln. Here, joined by best-selling author Dugard, he moves forward a century to recount events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the terrible day itself. And the subtitle suggests a look at the long-range consequences.

Presilla, Maricel E. Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America. Norton. Oct. 2012. ISBN 9780393050691. 864p. $45. COOKBOOKS
Lots of cookbooks out there on Latin American favorites, but this one seems truly comprehensive—just look at the page count (and there are 500 recipes). Co-owner of the Latin restaurants Zafra and Cucharamama in Hoboken, NJ (and a Ph.D. in medieval Spanish history—I like that), Presilla ranges from Mexico to Argentina and through the Spanish-speaking Caribbean to show us that Latin American cuisine is not just tamales but adobos, sofritos, sancocho, and more. With a five-city tour to New York, Miami, San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Los Angeles; seems pretty much essential if you’ve got the audience.
Quammen, David. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Norton. Oct. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780393066807. $28.95. SCIENCE
AIDS. SARS. Ebola. Frightening diseases with one thing in common: like other diseases even now being discovered, they originate with wild animals and are c`ommunicated to humans in a process called spillover. (It’s the price we pay for invading their space.) The John Burroughs Medal–winning author of The Song of the Dodo went into the field with scientists who trap bats in China and monkeys in Bangladesh to understand how and why these diseases emerge. For more on this critical issue, see Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin’s Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It and Peter Piot’s No Time To Lose: Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses, both out next month, and Nathan Wolfe’s recent The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age.

Queenan, Joe. One for the Books. Viking. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780670025824. $24.95. LITERATURE
When he hasn’t been working as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Spy, and other publications, writing for venues ranging from Time to Rolling Stone, or coming up with best-selling books like Closing Time: A Memoir, Queenan is reading, reading, reading. But he avoids books praised as “astonishing” and picks his reads in unusual ways: with his eyes closed, for instance, or by digging up books he always thought he would hate. By not taking a glowy aren’t-books-profound approach, he could be showing us what reading is all about. Try this, literati.

Schwalbe, Will. The End of Your Life Book Club. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780307594037. $25; eISBN 9780307961112. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. MEMOIR/LITERATURE
The hugely accomplished Schwalbe has had a hand in publishing (he’s a former senior vice president and editor in chief at Hyperion Books), journalism (he’s had pieces in the New York Times), and the new media (he founded of Cookstr.com). But then he’s had to keep up with his mother, who taught at Harvard and the Dalton School and then spent ten years building libraries in Afghanistan. When she was preparing for chemotherapy treatments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Schwalbe asked her what she had read lately, and so began a habit of reading the same books and discussing them—an activity that sustained Schwalbe’s mother throughout her treatments. A perfect book-club book about books and the community they create that also portrays the love between mother and son; with a reading group guide (no surprise) and a six-city tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Sethi, Aman. A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. Norton. Oct. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780393088908. $24.95. BIOGRAPHY/CURRENT EVENTS
A former biology student who has worked as a butcher, tailor, and electrician’s apprentice, Mohammed Ashraf is indeed free of the baggage of everyday life; he is now a homeless day laborer in Old Dehli. Sethi, a correspondent for the Hindu whose reporting has earned him an International Committee of the Red Cross award, aims to illuminate the global economic crisis by detailing what happened to Ashraf, providing vivid scenes of a tuberculosis hospital, Beggars Court, and the Old Delhi Railway Station where Ashraf and his friends gather. Already an international best seller; I’m feeling good about this book.

Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Brothers Grimm. Norton. Oct. 2012. 576p. ISBN 9780393088861. $39.95. FAIRY TALES
It’s been 200 years since the publication of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s Stories and Household Tales, which collected the treasures of Europe’s oral folk tradition. To celebrate, here’s a deluxe edition of indefatigable Harvard folklorist Tatar’s annotated Grimm anthology, first published by Norton in 2004. Six new tales have been added (e.g., “Four Clever Brothers” and “The White Snake”), and even more illustrations grace the pages. (Think Arthur Rackham and George Cruikshank, among others.) Definitely consider replacing those battered 2004 copies.

Brunson, Paul Carrick. It’s Complicated (But It Doesn’t Have To Be): A Modern Guide to Finding and Keeping Love. Gotham: Penguin Books (USA). Sep. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781592407699. $22.50. RELATIONSHIPS
“Modern Day Matchmaker” Brunson ditched his high-paying portfolio management job to do something far nobler: helping people find love. Young, black, and male, he’s not your average dating coach; he got inspired to switch careers when he realized that all the children at a summer camp he ran for the underserved in Washington, DC, came from single-parent homes. Among other things, Brunson hosts matchmaking events in numerous cities, but  if you can’t make them, you can still get this book. Aimed at everyone.

Burke, Monte. 4th and Goal: From the Gridiron to the Boardroom and Back. Grand Central. Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781455514045. $26.99. SPORTS/AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Joe Moglia always wanted to coach college football, but family responsibilities meant climbing onto the corporate ladder instead. Eventually, he became the CEO of TD Ameritrade—and then he quit, determined to pursue the dream he’d deferred. Now, after a stint of unpaid coaching to get back into the game after 25 years, he’s head football coach at Coastal Carolina University. We could all use inspiration like this.

Danza, Tony. I’d Like To Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High. Crown. Sept. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780770436704. $26. EDUCATION/MEMOIR
Yes, that’s Danza, the Golden Globe and Emmy nominee you know from Taxi, teaching English at Philadelphia’s Northeast High. After years of acting success, he felt it was payback time, and being a teacher appealed. What he discovered: it’s really hard work. A great antidote to all those pieces by folks who consider teaching glorified babysitting; you might know this from a short series on A&E called Teach, which covered Danza’s 2009–10 classroom year.

House, Karen Elliot. On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Contradictions—and Future. Knopf. Sept. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780307272164. $30; eISBN 9780307960993. CURRENT EVENTS
A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and then foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal, House has been familiarizing herself with Saudi Arabia over 30 years. Here she draws on her access to the ruling Al Saud family, including the king, crown prince, and many government ministers, to paint a portrait of a country that remains central to Middle East politics and America’s future—it’s our second largest oil supplier. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Issenberg, Sasha. The Victory Lab. Crown. Sept. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780307954794. $26. POLITICS
Explains Issenberg, who covered the 2008 election for the Boston Globe, it’s not business as usual in the political realm. Academics, statisticians, and strategists are shoving aside seasoned advisers, emphasizing data rather than instinct as they change completely how campaigns are managed. A chapter from this book, “Rick Perry and His Eggheads,” was enthusiastically embraced when released as an e-original—Politico called it “Moneyball for Politics”—and Issenberg just launched a column on Slate, also called “The Victory Lab.” So there’s already a readership.

Leman, Talia. a random book about the power of ANYone by a random kid. Free Pr: S. & S. Sept. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781451664843. pap. $14.99. PHILANTHROPHY
At age ten, Leman did something remarkable: she organized the efforts of kids like herself nationwide and raised $10 million for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Then she launched a campaign that again brought youngsters together to help their counterparts in 20 countries worldwide. Here Leman explains how she did it, using advice like “Use Your Inexperience Shamelessly” to show what it takes—enthusiasm, determination, and a ready wit—as she encourages others to follow her example.

Reiss, Tom. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. Crown. Sept. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780307382467. $26. BIOGRAPHY
New Yorker writer Reiss’s The Orientalist, a New York Times best seller, unfolded the complicated life story of a Caucasus-born Jew who declared himself a Muslim prince. So Reiss seems the right man to chronicle Alexandre Dumas, a former slave who became a royal musketeer and eventually a noted general in Napoleon’s army. He would be unknown today had the son who shares his name not used his adventures to write numerous beloved and enduring novels, including, of course, The Count of Monte Cristo. The result of five years of research and bound to be fun.

Prescott, Townes III. Total Frat Move. Grand Central. Sept. 2012. 220p. ISBN 9781455515035. $18.99. HUMOR
Drawing on the raucous website and Twitter feed of the same name, this book celebrates just how raunchy, lowdown, and, shall we say, unstudious frat life has become. Prescott is the (rather glam) pseudonym for a self-described hard-partying rich boy who was among the three Texas State grads who founded the site. Said to make Animal House look quaint; your move.

Robinson, Gene. God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage. Knopf. Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780307957887. $24; eISBN 9780307961754. RELIGION
Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church and the first openly gay person elected to the historic episcopate, Robinson has penned an argument in favor of gay rights and gay marriage grounded in the Bible that he loves. His audience: gays and lesbians who want to argue their case, heterosexuals who want to understand, and policy makers who need to understand. With a 50,000-copy first printing; inevitably a controversy stirrer despite the devout and congenial tone.

Sheldrake, Rupert. Science Set Free: Dispelling Dogma. Deepak Chopra: Crown. Sept. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780770436704. $26. SCIENCE
Biologist Sheldrake, once a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and now a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, aims to persuade fellow scientists that a strictly materialist worldview will eventually hold back their work. What’s interesting here is not just that Shekdrake is the author of the best-selling Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home but that this new work is the lead title in Deepak Chopra’s new imprint.

Thomas, Evan. Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle To Save the World. Little, Brown. Sept. 2012. 423p. ISBN 9780316091046. $29.99. CD: Hachette Audio. HISTORY
The genial Dwight Eisenhower was apparently a crack poker player, routinely cleaning out his fellow army officers, and, argues Thomas, he took a big, poker-faced gamble when as President he confronted the Soviet Union, China, and his own saber-rattling generals. A former Newsweek editor at large, now teaching at Princeton, Thomas explains how his careful strategy paid off—for him and for the world.

Velasquez-Manoff, Moises. An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases. Scribner. Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781439199381. $26. HEALTH/MEDICINE
Worm therapy. It sounds disgusting, but consider. In the 20th century, many serious diseases were eradicated or sharply curtailed through better hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics, and more. In the process, we may have also eradicated organisms that help keep our bodies in balance, as evidenced by the rise in allergic or autoimmune diseases like asthma and Crohn’s disease. As science journalist Velasquez-Manoff explains, some researchers are trying to counter these diseases through the use of parasitic worms (helminthes) to help the immune system adjust. This should be fascinating if quease-inducing reading.

Witchell, Alex. All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia, with Refreshments. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594487354. $26.95. MEMOIR
New York Times Magazine columnist Witchell can be hard-driving, but here she reveals a gentle side. As her mother, who always sustained her, slides into dementia, Witchell holds on by cooking up and sharing favorite recipes from her 1950s childhood. We could learn something here.

Annan, Kofi. Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Sept. 2012. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). NAp. ISBN 9781594204203. $36. MEMOIR/CURRENT EVENTS
Few memoirs coming out this year will be as interesting and as important as this one by Annan, seventh Secretary-General of the UN from January 1997 to December 2006 and a corecipient (with the UN itself) of the Nobel Peace Prize for having founded the Global AIDS and Health Fund. Check in on how the world turned during his time in office.

Bar-Zohar, Michael & Nissim Mishal. Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062123404. $26.99; eISBN 9780062123442. HISTORY
Official biographer of David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, Bar-Zohar joins with leading Israeli TV personality Mishal to document the history of Israel’s crack intelligence service, focusing on high-profile cases ranging from Eichmann’s apprehension to the killing of important Iranian nuclear scientists—which makes the book particularly relevant. With a 30,000-copy first printing.

Bawer, Bruce. Children of the Revolution: How Identity Studies Have Destroyed American Higher Education. Broadside: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780061807374. $25.99; eISBN 9780062097064. HISTORY/EDUCATION
Since Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within was a New York Times best seller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and his Stealing Jesus a PW Best Book of the Year, it’s worth paying attention to his latest, a critique of how identity politics have shaped the academy in the last four decades. Not everyone will agree with Bawer that Chicano, African American, and Women’s Studies courses are exercises strictly in power struggle and victimhood that have gotten in the way of objective reasoning, but then listening to all sides of the argument is exactly what thoughtful readers should do. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Gitlin, Todd. Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. It: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 176p. ISBN 9780062200921. pap. $10. CURRENT EVENTS
Wall Street may not be occupied right now, but the Occupy Wall Street movement has changed our way of thinking; we all know what that “99 percent” means. Arguing that the movement has been misrepresented by both the Left and the Right, Gitlin—author, Columbia journalism/sociology professor, and former president of Students for a Democratic Society—considers the causes and consequences of the movement and where it might go next. Not a huge printing, but right for the right readers; note the 99 percent–friendly paperback price.

Greenberg, Andy. This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free the World’s Information. Dutton. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780525953203. $26.95. TECHNOLOGY/CURRENT EVENTS
In the Sixties we marched in the streets. Now many young men and women fed up with the government, the military, and the corporations slip into silent whistleblower mode, anonymously uploading institutional secrets that they feel should be exposed. Think WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and OpenLeaks, and think about the long-term impact, as Forbes reporter Greenberg has us do here.

Johnson, Joyce. The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. Viking. Sept. 2012. 512p. ISBN 9780670025107. $32.95. BIOGRAPHY
Nine months before On the Road was published, aspiring novelist Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date set up by Allen Ginsberg. Minor Characters, her National Book Critics Circle Award winner, detailed their relationship. Here Johnson looks at Kerouac the young artist, showing that his French Canadian background, which left him suspended between two languages and two cultures, deeply influenced his work. For literati everywhere.

Lofgren, Mike. The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Viking. Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780670026265. $24.95. CURRENT EVENTS
Lofgren, a Republican who worked as a Congressional staffer for 28 years—the last 16 as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees—made news in September 2011 when he angrily quit over the debt ceiling crisis. Critical though he is of the tired Democrats, he saves his real bashing for the Republicans, whom he called lunatics in a piece he subsequently wrote for Truthout. That piece got so many hits so fast that the site crashed; reading the book might be just as tumultuous an experience.

McCord, Catherine. Weelicious: Fast, Easy, and Fresh Recipes Your Kids Want To Eat! Morrow Cookbooks. Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780062078445. $27.50. COOKING
With a new baby and a culinary degree, McCord was well positioned to launch Weelicious.com, which began as a compendium of baby food purees and now fosters family eating that is healthful and tasty and suggests how to teach kids to make smart choices about food. The site gets more than 500,000 hits a day and was among the New York Observer’s Top Ten “Must Read” Websites for Parents, so this should be in demand. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Viking. Sept. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780670025923. $26.95. BIOGRAPHY
Appearing in The New Yorker a year after David Foster Wallace’s suicide at age 46, Max’s “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle To Surpass Infinite Jest” really fired up readers. Now Max offers what is less a portrait of the man than of the artist, detailing Wallace’s struggles to become a novelist while circumventing depression and addiction. He also explores Wallace’s powerful impact on American letters—particularly as a symbol of integrity in an increasingly slick world.

Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594203497. $25.95. HISTORY
Having ranged from Duff Cooper Prize winner Salonica City of Ghosts to Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Hitler’s Empire, among many other titles, Oxford-trained historian Mazower—now director of the Center for International History at Columbia University—seems good and ready to discuss world government from the post-Napoleonic era forward. Go for it, history fans.

Mendez, Antonio & Matt Baglio. Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History. Viking. Sept. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780670026227. $26.95. Downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORY
In 1979, after Iranian militants stormed the American Embassy in Tehran, creating a hostage situation that lasted 444 days, six Americans escaped. Then a CIA agent, Mendez arranged for their rescue by bringing a bunch of Hollywood directors, producers, and actors to Iran, ostensibly to scout locations for a film they dubbed Argo but in fact to contact the escapees and smuggle them out. A crazy plan, but it worked, and Mendez is sharing the details only now. Yes, a film about the rescue is forthcoming, starring Ben Affleck and releasing in September.

Miller, Carol. Up All Night: My Life and Times in Rock Radio. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780061845246. $24.99. MEMOIR/MUSIC
You bet that there are readers anticipating this memoir by the country’s top female disc jockey, who was raised in a staunchly intellectual Jewish household in Queens, got into progressive rock radio while at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with legends like Cousin Brucie, went all chatty with Paul McCartney and dated Steve Tyler, and eventually made it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, having hugely shaped the business with her distinctive on-air approach. Here she tells her story, revealing her battle with cancer and fears about an unnamed illness that has taken many family members early in life, which gave her a real incentive to accomplish.

Perry, Michael. Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace. Harper: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780061894442. $25.99; eISBN 9780062097798. BIOGRAPHY
Perry recently returned home to a 37-acre farm in New Auburn, WI (see his Population: 485), where he serves on the local rescue service when not commenting for NPR or acting as a contributing editor to Men’s Health. He’s also neighbors with octogenarian Tom Hartwig, who builds his own cannons, runs a shop seemingly “stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake,” and defies the four-lane interstate that was shoved through his front yard a few decades back. Perry is a good author—2009’s Coop was an Indie best seller and won a bunch of regional awards—and this portrait of an individual is also a welcome portrait of an underrepresented place and lifestyle. So check it out, especially if Perry come to your neighborhood; his driving tour takes him to Iowa City, Des Moines, Chicago, Wichita, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Lincoln, and Nashville, as well as Northfield, Stillwater, and Minneapolis, MN, and Madison, Rice, Red Wing, and Milwaukee, WI.

Ricks, Thomas E. The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today. Sept. 2012. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. ISBN 9781594204043. $36. CURRENT EVENTS
Once a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, currently with the Center for a New American Security and a Foreign Policy blogger, Pulitzer Prize winner Ricks has already given us two best-selling books on our recent venture in Iraq, The Gamble and Fiasco. Here he steps back to provide a broader picture of military leadership—and particularly the decline in sound military leadership—since World War II. No doubt sobering.

Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594204111. $27.95. SOCIAL SCIENCE
In 2008, Silver created the polling website and blog FiveThirtyEight.com (named for the number of electors in the electoral college), then relaunched the blog with the New York Times two years later. Here he challenges the very idea of making predictions in everything from weather to politics (interesting position for a pollster), so I won’t venture to say how this book will do. But it has a built-in audience.

Simmons, Sylvie. I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780061994982. $27.99. BIOGRAPHY/MUSIC
A music journalist who’s profiled folks like Neil Young and Johnny Cash and recently won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for her liner notes for Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, Simmons conducted more than 100 interviews with friends and musicians (ranging from Judy Collins to, interestingly, Phillip Glass) to craft this portrait of the man who gave us such immortal songs as “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire.” Music lovers of a certain age will want, and since Cohen has just wrapped up a sold-out three-year world tour after a 15-year hiatus, he’ll be on their minds.

Weiss, Luisa. My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes). Viking. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780670025381. $26.95. MEMOIR/COOKING
When cookbook editor Weiss launched Thewednesdaychef.com, now an award-winning blog that boasts 100,000 unique visitors per month, it was just the beginning of a dramatic story. As she wrote about cooking her way through a stack of recipes, she was inspired to dump her fiancé, then her job, then her home, leaving New York for Berlin, where she had been partly raised by her Italian mother. Yummy tales, like foraging for plums in an abandoned orchard; even the curmudgeonly might want to head for the kitchen. With an eight-city tour.

White, Kate. Sweet Success: How To Get It, Run with It, Savor It. Harper Business: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062122124. $24.99. BUSINESS
Here’s what White is doing when she’s not at her desk as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan or writing best sellers like the Bailey Weggins mystery series: she’s writing a career guide for women aiming to make it today’s tumultuous business world. To achieve success, says White, you’ve got to “Get It”—that is, take a risk that will land you ahead of the curve, as White did when she put Lady Gaga on Cosmo’s cover—then keep building on what you’ve done and learn to enjoy it (or why bother?). With a 40,000-copy first printing and lots of publicity through social media.

Boyle, T.C. San Miguel. Viking. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780670026241. $27.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. LITERARY
In 1888, ailing Marantha Waters moves to the desolate isle of San Miguel Island off Southern California’s coast with her Civil War veteran husband, who runs a sheep farm there and does everything he can to keep their aspiring-actress daughter from slipping her bonds and returning to the mainland. In 1930, New York City librarian Elise Lester and her gung-ho World War I veteran husband choose to settle on San Miguel and like the Waters family achieve only an uncertain peace. As always, Boyle gives us sharp moral conundrum in a distinctive setting; with an eight-city tour.

Chabon, Michael. Telegraph Avenue. Harper: Harper Collins. Sept. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780061493348. $27.99; eISBN 9780062124609. CD: HarperAudio. LITERARY
Race, corporatism, and last-stand idealism: core themes of contemporary American life, and who better to explore them than Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon, whose linguistic razzle-dazzle discloses acute observations about our shared culture—and, especially, its borders. It’s 2004, and longtime band mates Achy Stallings and Nat Jaffe still preside over Brokeland Records, a used-record emporium and de facto town center in a fictional space somewhere between Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives are the Berkeley Birth Partners, beloved local midwives. All’s well until a former NFL quarterback, one of the country’s richest African Americans, decides to build his latest Dogpile megastore on nearby Telegraph Avenue. Not only could this spell doom for the little shop and its cross-race, cross-class dream but it opens up past history regarding Archy’s untethered dad and a crime dating back to the Black Panther era. With a one-day laydown on September 11, a 300,000-copy first printing, and a 13-city Tour to Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami (for the book fair) Nashville, New York, Raleigh/Durham, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC. Get it!

Coplin, Amanda. The Orchardist. Harper: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780062188502. $25.99. HISTORICAL
At the turn of the 20th century, when two dirty, pregnant girls steal from an orchard in the foothills of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Mountains that Talmadge has tended for 50 years, he lets them. Soon they return, tentatively befriending this sweet, solitary soul, as rooted as the trees in the land he loves. Then armed and angry men invade the orchard, and Talmadge steps up to protect his new charges, even as he’s reminded of the past’s sorrowful secrets. Exceptional in-house cheering for this debut, with rights sold to a half-dozen countries so far and a 75,000-copy first printing. Surely this is meant as an evocative understanding of the American West and its continued grip on our psyche, and I can’t wait to see how it works.

Ennis, Michael. The Malice of Fortune. Doubleday. Sept. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780385536318. $26.95; eISBN 9780385536325. Downloadable: Random Audio. THRILLER
When his son Juan is murdered in distant Imola, Pope Alexander asks the courtesan Damiata to discover what happened—and holds her young son hostage until she does. In Imola, Damiata is so undercut by the political intrigue originating with the pope’s other son, the Duke Valentino, that she turns to a little-known Florentine diplomat named Niccolo Machiavelli for help; the observational skills she needs to catch the killer are ultimately furnished by one Leonardo da Vinci. Now that sounds like fun reading; the publisher’s big fiction title of the month.

Smith, Zadie. NW: A Novel. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594203978. $25.95. LITERARY
It’s been seven years since Smith last published a novel, so we’re all really chaffing to read this one. NW stands for northwest, that is, northwest London, where a group of friends living on an estate make their way through school and on to adulthood, staying more or less true to their ideals. Smith, herself was born in London’s diverse northwest, will surely provide her usual gorgeous, almost scary understanding of that society and the world at large.

Toobin, Jeffrey. The Oath: The Obama White House vs. The Supreme Court. Doubleday. Sept. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780385527200. $27.95; eISBN 9780385536301. Downloadable: Random Audio LAW/CURRENT EVENTS
Having laid bare the working of the Supreme Court in his prize-winning The Nine, Toobin returns to assess how the Court—and, specifically, Chief Justice John Roberts—stack up against President Obama. From the moment that Roberts blew administering the Oath of Office at Obama’s inauguration, he and the administration have been ideologically at odds. Toobin argues that the two men are both charismatic and ambitious, though Obama’s actually the conservative one; he aims for step-by-step change, building on the past, while Roberts wants to unstitch everything accomplished by the New Deal. Essential reading as we gear up for the election.

Badman, Keith. Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years. St. Martin’s. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780312607142. $25.99; eISBN 9781250012388. BIOGRAPHY
Having disposed of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Stones, Badman goes after another celebrity icon. Among his putative revelations: the identity of Marilyn Monroe’s biological father, what really happened with JFK, and her exploitation by mobsters at a hotel owned by Frank Sinatra. Another on the Monroe bandwagon.

Gemmell, Nikki. With My Body. HarperPerennial: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780062122636. pap. $14.99; eISBN 9780062122643. POP FICTION
Gemmell follows up her sensationalist best seller, The Bride Stripped Bare, with another fictional exploration of female sexuality. Here, a woman who feels suffocated by marriage and children recalls the one love affair that really did something for her. With a 100,000-copy first printing and a reading group guide—for those, I guess, who don’t blush easily.

Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Random. Jul. 2012. 286p. ISBN 9780812993295. $25. LITERARY FICTION
A leading actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then an award-winning author of plays for the BBC, Joyce is taking on another role: novelist. And a successful one at that, it seems, with rights for this debut sold to more than 25 countries. When cranky retiree Harold Fry gets a letter from an old friend he’s not seen in two decades, revealing that she’s in hospice, he decides to visit her. And he decides that to do so he’ll walk the 600 miles from Kingsbridge to Berwick upon Tweed. Refreshing premise; let’s all watch.

Lepore, Jill. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death. Knopf. Jun. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780307592996. $27.95; eISBN 9780307958501. HISTORY
Okay, grand subtitle, but Lepore—Harvard historian, New Yorker staff writer, and author (e.g., New York Burning)—has something focused in mind and will likely pull it off. Here she explores how ideas about life and death have shaped American history and politics. For your thoughtful readers.

Locke, Kate. God Save the Queen.(Immortal Empire, Bk 1.). Orbit: Hachette. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780316196123. $16.99. STEAMPUNK
It’s called the steampunk debut of the year, and it opens in 2012 with an undead Queen Victoria still ruling and the aristocracy made up mostly of vampires and werewolves. Elite Guard Xandra Vardan goes looking for her missing sister and starts doubting everything she once believed. Meanwhile, conspiracy brews. From best-selling YA author Kady Cross (like Kate Locke, a pseudonym); should be big.

Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel. Holt. May 2012. 432p. ISBN 9780805090031. $28. HISTORICAL FICTION
Deservedly a winner of both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Mantel’s best-selling Wolf Hall is audaciously good historical fiction portraying Thomas Cronwell’s rise to power as Henry VIII’s adviser. In this follow-up, Henry is ready to get rid of Anne Boleyn, a job that falls to Cromwell—which means that he must ally himself with his archenemies, the papist aristocracy. We’ll all been waiting for this one.

Mawer, Simon. Trapeze. Other Pr. May 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781590515273. pap. $15.95. HISTORICAL THRILLER
Only 19, native French speaker Marian Sutro is trained as an agent by the Special Operations Executive and parachuted into wartime France. Her mission, to join the WORDSMITH resistance network, has been hijacked by yet another secret organization, which wants her to persuade a research scientist in Paris to join the Allied effort. Mawer’s The Glass Room was both a New York Times best seller and a Man Booker Prize shortlisted title, so this looks promising indeed.

Sharpe, Katherine. Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are. Harper Perennial: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780062059734. pap. $14.99. SOCIAL SCIENCE
In 2005, antidepressants surged past blood-pressure medication as the most frequently prescribed drug in America, with an astonishing ten percent of the population using them (and that was then). The former editor and community manager of Seed magazine’s ScienceBlogs.com, Sharpe has the background to understand this phenomenon, but she also has personal experience; she was prescribed Zoloft in college after a panic attack. Here she explores the consequences of antidepressant use by increasingly younger patients, whose self-understanding and coping skills are thus distorted. Important information to consider; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

Solomon, John. DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Thomas Dunne Bks: St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781250012630. $25.99; eISBN 9781250013057. CURRENT EVENTS
Director of news and investigative reporting at The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, Solomon aims to get to the heart of the case involving a New York hotel maid’s accusation that she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund—a case that saw the media gunning first on the accused and then on the accuser.

Zafón, Carlos Ruiz. The Prisoner of Heaven. Harper: HarperCollins. 416p. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780062206282. $27.99. lrg. prnt. CD: HarperAudio LITERARY THRILLER
As entertainingly twisted as Gaudi’s architecture, only darker, Zafón’s best-selling fiction (e.g., The Shadow of the Wind) inhabits a distinctive Barcelona. At Christmas in 1957, Daniel Sempere and his wife are enjoying their new son and the prospect of their friend Fermín’s marriage when a stranger arrives at their bookshop, prepared to reveal a dark secret harking back to Franco’s early days. With a 200,000-copy first printing and a seven-city tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC; don’t miss.

Kitamura, Katie. Gone to the Forest. Free Pr: S. & S. Aug. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781451656640. pap. $15. LITERARY
Since his mother died, Tom and his father have dwelled together uneasily on their farm in an unnamed colonial country close to violence. Then a young woman named Carine enters their lives, forming a triangle and causing tensions to flare openly even as a volcanic eruption tips the country into revolution. A New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award finalist, Kitamura here follows up her highly regarded first novel, The Longshot, with something that sounds both smart and gripping for a wide range of readers. Note the reading group guide and the ebook/App promotion.

Stedman, ML. The Light Between Oceans. Scribner. Aug. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781451681734. $25. HISTORICAL
After World War I, Tom Sherbourne takes a job as lighthouse keeper on isolated Janus Rock, off the coast of Australia, where the supply boat comes only four times a year. His spunky wife, Isabel, suffers two miscarriages and a still birth in three years, so it’s no surprise that when a boat washes up carrying a dead man and a live baby, Isabel persuades Tom not to report the incident and takes the baby as hers. That causes trouble, of course, when they eventually return to the mainland. Big in-house excitement for his first novel, which will be backed by NPR coverage and a reading group guide. Tops on my reading list. 

Grunwald, Michael. The New New Deal.  S. & S. Aug. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781451642322. $27. CURRENT EVENTS
Listen up, voters: though Democrats don’t get it and Republicans hate it, Obama’s stimulus bill truly has been transformative, a broader-reaching program than even the New Deal. It not only short-circuited a looming depression and saved millions of jobs but is helping restructure America’s energy program, bringing healthcare into the Digital age, and changing everything from unemployment insurance to the government’s approach to homelessness. So argues Time senior correspondent Grunwald, winner of a George Polk Award, in a book that will surely prompt lots of discussion. 

Marton, Kati. Paris: A Love Story. S. & S. Aug. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781451691542. $24. MEMOIR
Paris is important to many of us, but it’s really important to journalist/author Marton (Enemies of the People). There she studied as a college student in the explosive year of 1968; researched her family’s escape to France from communist Hungary; served as ABC bureau chief in a career breakthrough; met her first husband, Peter Jennings; and then met her second husband, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, finally returning to Paris to mourn his death. A distinctive view of the City of Light.

Andersen, Kurt. Trust Me. Random. Jul. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9781400067206. $27; eISBN 9781588366863. LITERARY
Cofounder of Spy, former editor in chief of New York magazine, and cocreator and host of the award-winning Public Radio program Studio 360, Andersen knows his way around the zeitgeist; just take a look at his two novels, Turn of the Century (which drew comparisons to Bonfire of the Vanities) and the New York Times best-selling Heyday. Here he returns with another cultural study, this one featuring an eminent sixtyish judge who withdraws from consideration for a Supreme Court seat because of events in her youth. Revelations about those events will tell us as much about the country as they do about Hollander. With a six-city tour (Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Omaha, San Francisco, and Los Angeles), an NPR campaign, a custom Facebook page, early pitches to Goodreads and LibraryThing, book club outreach, and even a thriller platform (that says something); this will be big.

Carter, Stephen L. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. Knopf. Jul. 2012. 528p. ISBN 9780307272638. $26.95. CD: Random House Audio. HISTORICAL FICTION
There’s trouble for President Abraham Lincoln in this imaginatively conceived alternate history. After he survives Booth’s assassination attempt, he’s accused of violating the Constitution in his conduct of the war and faces impeachment. His defense team includes a young black woman, just graduated from Oberlin, who’s enjoying the opportunity to flummox purse-lipped Washington society until one of Lincoln’s lead lawyers is murdered. History, mystery, and profound political questions from the author of the million-plus-copy best seller The Emperor of Ocean Park—who of course is also an esteemed professor at Yale Law School. With a five-city tour to Boston, elsewhere in New England, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, plus a reading group guide.

French, Tana, Broken Harbor. Viking. Jul. 2012. 464p. ISBN 9780670023653. $27.95. THRILLER
Remember Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, top cop from multi-award-winner French’s Faithful Places? He’s back, puzzling over the murder of Patrick Spain and his two children, found at one of those half-built luxury developments riddling now-broke Ireland; Patrick’s wife Jenny languishes in intensive care. Weirdly, the baby cams are all turned to holes bludgeoned in the house’s walls, and Jenny recalls an intruder who got past every lock. Worse, the case upends Scorcher’s sister, Dina, recalling a trauma from their childhood. With Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night, among the publisher’s biggest fiction of the year; get multiples.

Harkness, Deborah. Shadow of Night. Viking. Jul. 2012. 592p. ISBN 9780670023486. $28.95; CD: Penguin Audio. PARANORMAL
A Discovery of Witches, Harkness’s phenomenal debut novel, was hatched when she asked herself what a vampire hanging about for all those centuries would do as a job. Vampire Matthew Clairmont is a geneticist who’s joined forces (in more ways than one) with scholar and witch-in-rebellion Diana Bishop. Here, to quell a battle of supernatural forces stemming from an enchanted manuscript that seems to have vanished, they’ve time-traveled back to Elizabethan London. Diana gets tutored in magic, Matthew confronts his past, and the School of Night (you know, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh…) makes an appearance. With a 14-city tour; grab it.

Wilson, G. Willow. Alif the Unseen. Grove. Jul. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780802120205. $25; eISBN 9780802194626. LITERARY
Author of award-winning graphic novels and comics series, plus the memoir The Butterfly Mosque, about her conversion to Islam, Wilson offers a debut novel featuring an Arab-Indian hacker in an unspecified Middle East country. Alif, dedicated to protecting dissidents and others under surveillance, is forced underground when the woman he loves dumps him for a prince who turns out to be the dreaded “Hand of God”—head of the state’s electronic security forces. While in hiding, Alif discovers a secret book belonging to a jinn that could change the very concept of information technology. One of the publisher’s big books of the season, this intriguing-sounding blend of cyberfantasy and the Arabian Nights will be backed by a ten-city tour to Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Boulder, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

Kunstler, James Howard. Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. Atlantic Monthly. Jul. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780802120304. $25; eISBN 9780802194381. CURRENT EVENTS
Back in 2005, Kunstler’s The Long Emergency highlighted the imminence of an oil-dry future as it moved through 150,000 copies and sold to nine territories. Since then, Kunstler has been asked to speak at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences and annually welcomes 700,000 unique visitors to his website. Here he looks at the drawbacks of various alternate technologies, arguing that, pie-in-the-sky optimists to the contrary, technology doesn’t have easy solutions to the energy crisis. A big book for the publisher that’s poised to make waves.

Coren, Stanley. Do Dogs Dream?: Nearly Everything Your Dog Wants You To Know. Norton. Jul. 2012. 160p. ISBN 9780393073485. $23.95.  PETS
Author of best sellers like The Intelligence of Dogs, Coren is your go-to guy when you’re seeking information about canines. Here, using a Q&A format, he brings both his expertise and a certain cheeky flair to 75 questions about the social and emotional lives of dogs, e.g., do they see themselves in the mirror? And when those little paws start moving in their sleep, do they really dream? My dog says yes.

Crist, David. The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Jul. 2012. 576p. ISBN 9781594203411. $36. CURRENT EVENTS
CIA spies square off against their counterparts in Iran, Iranian speedboats attack Western oil tankers, and Iran counters the American invasion of Iraq by sending in soldiers disguised as tourists, reporters, and aid workers. Iran and the United States have engaged in an unacknowledged almost-war for three decades, argues Crist, who as senior historian for the federal government has access to the people and the papers that can give him the data to make his case. Important. and deeply relevant; see today’s news story about an American man sentenced to death by an Iran court on charges of spying.

Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel. Random. Jul. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9781400069071. $35; eISBN 9780679603412. BIOGRAPHY
Chancellor to Henry II, then his nemesis as Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett was exiled for six years and assassinated by four of Henry’s knights upon his return home. Perhaps a well-known story, but Guy has the credentials to tell it well, having lectured in early modern British history and presented five documentaries for BBC2 television. Pitched as appropriate for undergraduate use, so definitely for your high-end readers.

Harjo, Joy. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. Norton. Jul. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780393073461. $24.95. MEMOIR
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle, poet/performer Harjo writes verse suffused with spiritual concern, sociopolitical hunger, and evidence of her Muskogee Creek heritage. This memoir returns to her youth (abusive stepfather, Indian arts boarding school, single motherhood as a teenager) to disclose how she became a poet. Expect beautiful writing, and look how popular Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge was.

Herman, Arthur. Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Built the Arsenal of Democracy That Won World War II. Random. Jul. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9781400069644. $27; eISBN 9780679604631. HISTORY/ECONOMICS
Pulitzer Prize finalist for Ghandi & Churchill, Herman here presents businessmen as the good guys, showing how two in particular—Danish immigrant William Knudsen and shipbuilding magnate Henry Kaiser—pummeled businesses around the country to build what was needed for the war effort. The result? Service to democracy and the creation of the military-industrial complex. Not just for history fans.

Martin, Steven. Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction. Villard. Jul. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9780345517838. $26; eISBN 9780345517852. MEMOIR
Having settled in Thailand because of a longtime interest in the glories of the Orient past, freelance reporter Martin began collecting opium-smoking equipment. Then he began smoking opium, developing a bottomless addiction broken only by a stay at a Buddhist monastery. Great on the shelf next to popular books like David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy and Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, and I understand that there’s real curiosity about this lesser-known drug; a 2000 Vanity Fair story by Nick Tosches still holds the record for reader response.

Meyer, Dakota & Bing West. Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War. Random. Jul. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780812993400. $28; eISBN 9780679645443. CURRENT EVENTS
Appropriately billed as Black Hawk Down meets Lone Survivor, this book tells what happened in September 2009 when a huge contingent of Taliban surrounded a company of Afghan soldiers and their marine advisers—including Meyer, who disobeyed his commanding officer and took charge of the company, saving 18 men and charging the enemy. He won a Medal of Honor, but his actions remain controversial, which should make this especially thought-provoking to read.

Phelps, Carissa with Larkin Warren. Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time. Viking. Jul. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780670023721. $26.95. MEMOIR
A runaway and school dropout by age 12 who worked the streets for a brutal pimp, Phelps finally freed herself and is now a lawyer also working with a global collective helping survivors of sex trafficking rebuild their lives. This memoir, following hard on the heels of an award-winning documentary, is stirring some interest.

Slotkin, Richard. The Long Road To Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution. Liveright: Norton. Jul. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780871404114. $32.95. HISTORY
As Slotkin tells it, the Civil War became a revolution in summer 1862, when Lincoln acknowledged that peaceful compromise was at that point impossible and thoroughly committed himself to war. First up in this new strategy: the Emancipation Proclamation. As Lincoln clashed with ambitious general George McClellan, the country started on the bloody road to Antietam. Cultural critic Slotkin, author of Regeneration Through Violence, likes to bust myths and look at our dark side.  

Wasik, Bill & Monica Murphy. Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. Viking. Jul. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780670023738. $25.95. HISTORY
The source of a brain infection that causes horrid symptoms and is nearly always fatal, rabies has been feared through the ages. Here Wired senior editor Wasik departs from his bailiwick to join wife Murphy, who has degrees in public health and veterinary medicine, to offer a cultural history of the disease—the myths it engendered and how it reflects our fear of the wild both within us and outside us. In-house interest is sparking; watch.

Williams. Terrie M. The Odyssey of KP2: An Orphan Seal, a Marine Biologist, and the Fight to Save a Species. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Jul. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781594203398. $27.95. NATURAL HISTORY
Hawaiian monk seals are the most endangered marine mammal in U.S. waters, with only 1100 remaining. So when a newborn pup was abandoned by his mother on a Kauai beach, he was brought to the marine lab in Santa Cruz despite resistance from the local community. Studying Kauai Pup 2 (KP2) to learn more about his species, wildlife biologist Williams also fell in love with his fun-loving spirit. Animal-human bonding, ecology, and the cutest face on the cover (not the author’s).