Library Journal

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.

Bennett, Amanda. The Cost of Hope. Random. Jun. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781400069842. $26; eISBN 9780679604846. MEMOIR/HEALTHCARE
Not your standard memoir. Yes, Bennett is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, currently executive editor at Bloomberg and cochair of the Pulitzer Prize board. And, yes, she writes about her marriage to the wacky, delightful Terrence and their struggle when he was diagnosed with cancer. But after Terrence’s death she requested his medical records and learned something about how medical costs are set that she wants to share with us all. A 30,000-copy first printing; not fluff.

Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan. Knopf. Jun. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780307967146. $27.95; eISBN 9780307958425. Downloadable: Random Audio. CURRENT EVENTS
Having taken on America’s pie-in-the-sky planning for the occupation of Iraq in Life in the Emerald City, an Overseas Press Club Book Award winner, Chandrasekaran is well equipped to consider the “war within the war” in southern Afghanistan in the year of Obama’s surge. There, the military parted ways with President Obama’s directives as nation building gave way to compromise and tacit acceptance of corruption. Important documentation that I hope readers aren’t too jaded to consider; with a 100,000-copy first printing.  

Cohen, Andy. Here’s What: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture. Holt. Jun. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780805095838. $25. MEMOIR/PERFORMING ARTS
Bravo’s executive vice president of original programming and development, Cohen is the man who gave us Real Housewives. Here he talks about his enduring love for television (as a kid, he wrote home from camp to remind his mother to record the soaps) and his experiences as a gay man. Go for it, pop fans.

Keen, Andrew. Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. 272p. ISBN 9780312624989. $25.99. TECHNOLOGY/SOCIAL SCIENCE
Social-media networking is supposed to be bringing us closer together. But in fact, argues Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who writes regularly for venues from the Weekly Standard to Jazziz, it ends up dividing rather than uniting us; the desire for individualistic expression (“it’s all about me”) trumps efforts at community building. An informed contrarian; keep your eye out.

McDermott, Terry & Josh Meyer, The Hunt for KSM. Little, Brown. Jun. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780316186599. $27.99. CURRENT EVENTS
Responsible for al-Qaeda’s recruitment, training, and terrorism, Khalid Sheik Mohammad is considered the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks; he was captured in March 2003 by American and Pakistani intelligence agents and remains in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. This story of his capture is based on hundreds of interviews conducted by journalist McDermott (Perfect Soldiers), author of an eye-opening piece on KSM (as he is known) in The New Yorker, and Pulitzer Prize winner Meyer, whose “Inside al Qaeda” series ran in the Los Angeles Times. Serious politicos will want this.  

McMillan, Tracy. Why You’re Not Married: Straight Talk You Need To Get the Relationship You Deserve. Ballantine. Jun. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780345532923. $25; eISBN 9780345532930. RELATIONSHIPS
McMillan has two interesting qualifications for writing this book. First, her Huffington Post piece on the subject is the fourth most viewed in Huffington history, having hit 1.4 million views and counting. Second, she has been married three times herself and has some idea of what went wrong. Pretty no-nonsense; one chapter called “You’re a Bitch” examines issues of anger and fear. Given the popularity of the original piece and the subject itself, this looks like a strong purchase.

Samuelsson, Marcus. Yes, Chef. Random. Jun. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780385342605. $26; eISBN 9780440338819. CD: Random Audio. MEMOIR/FOOD
Orphaned in Ethiopia, raised by an adoptive family in Sweden, the youngest chef ever to be given three stars by the New York Times, and recent proprietor of Red Rooster in Harlem, James Beard Award–winning chef Samuelsson has some story to tell. Yes, food memoirs are sizzling, Samuelsson has 30,000 Twitter followers, and the issues here go beyond eating—Samuelsson considers what it’s like to be a black man in the white-white world of upscale cooking.   

Sennett, Frank. Groupon’s Biggest Deal Ever: The Inside Story of How One Insane Gamble, Tons of Unbelievable Hype, and Millions of Wild Deals Made Billions for One Ballsy Joker. St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781250000842. $25.99. ECONOMICS
A discount service offering a deal a day at local merchants in cities worldwide, Groupon was founded by Andrew Mason, who turned down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google in 2010 and is now an online behemoth worth $30 billion. Groupon is now reputedly the fastest-growing company in Internet history. Sennett, who is Time Out Chicago’s editor in chief, profiles the company and risk-taker Mason. If you want to stay au courant.

Shriver, Mark. A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sarge Shriver. Holt. Jun. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780805095302. $24; CD: Macmillan Audio. MEMOIR
Sargent Shriver founded the Peace Corps and helped bring about President Johnson’s War on Poverty, but this is not an account of his accomplishments. Instead, son Mark portrays a kind and good man whose daily behavior was shaped by the principles articulated here, which the author determined through conversations and examination of notes and letters after his father’s death. A heart warmer.

Stott, Rebecca. Darwin’s Ghosts. Spiegel & Grau. Jun. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9781400069378. $27; eISBN 9780679604136. SCIENCE
There’s so much that’s intriguing about this book. First, the subject: Stott points out that evolution was not an idea dreamed up by Charles Darwin but evolved (pardon the expression) over millennia. Here she provides the history of an idea, starting with Aristotle and working up through the Arab world to the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. Second, Stott is not a scientist, which at first gave me pause, but a noteworthy novelist (Ghostwalk) and English literature professor. But she’s proved her science bona fides with the well-received Darwin and the Barnacle, and her writing skills should enhance the telling of this tale.

Stutz, Phil & Barry Michels. The Tools. Spiegel & Grau. Jun. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780679644446. $25; eISBN 9780679644453. CD: Random Audio. SELF-HELP/PSYCHOLOGY
Frustrated with how long standard therapy takes—the complaint of plenty of patients, too—psychotherapist Michels turned to Stutz, a psychiatrist who had devised a set of tools aimed at bringing about quick, decisive change. The results have been good enough to bring the authors a New Yorker profile, and because their Los Angeles–based practices bring celebrity patients as well, testimonials are promised that will surely drive readership. For me, though, the idea of rapid improvement instead of just talk, talk, talk is what appeals. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Tye, Larry. Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. Random. Jun. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9781400068661. $27; eISBN 9781588369185. CD: Random Audio. POP CULTURE/HISTORY
The best-selling author of Satchel, about Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige, here profiles a very different kind of American hero—one that is in fact imaginary. But as Tye shows, Superman both reflected and affected the American psyche tremendously. Tye uses his skills as a former Boston Globe reporter to interview over 300 people involved with the Superman story and even gives us some little-known facts about this hero—for instance, he’s Jewish. Now that should get people to read the book.