New and Upcoming Releases

Fiction

 May 2013

Maya's Notebook

By Isabel Allende

Allende (The House of the Spirits) moves away from her usual magical realist historical fiction into a contemporary setting, and the result is a chaotic hodgepodge. The story, told through 19-year-old Maya Vidal’s journals, alternates between Maya’s dismal past and uncertain present, which finds her in hiding on an isolated island off Chile’s coast, where her grandmother, Nidia, has taken her. Maya’s diary relates a journey into self-destruction that begins, after her beloved step-grandfather Popi’s death, with dangerous forays into sex, drugs, and delinquency, but ends up in a darkly cartoonish crime caper, as she becomes involved with gangsters in Las Vegas. Maya describes her present surroundings, meanwhile, with a bland detachment that would be more believable coming from an anthropologist than a teenager. Allende’s trademark passion for Chile is as strong as ever, and her clever writing lends buoyancy to the narrative’s deadweight, but this novel is unlikely to entrance fans old or new. Agent: Carmen Balcells, Carmen Balcells Agency. (May) 

A Dual Inheritance

By Joanna Hershon

Two college chums—one an ambitious Jew, the other a privileged, guilt-burdened WASP—who first meet in 1963 as Harvard seniors find their lives separating and intersecting around the same woman over many years, in Hershon’s searing novel about class, ethnicity, and love (both platonic and romantic). Ed Cantrowitz is straight out of Dorchester, Mass., abrasive but winningly forthright; Hugh Shipley, heir to a valued name but decayed fortune, is deeply ambivalent about both his old-money connections and his own obvious charm; and Helen, Hugh’s high school sweetheart, all forge a connection that defies conventional wisdom. Even though their intimacy comes to a nominal end early in their lives, for reasons known only to Helen and Ed, the impact of this connection echoes through decades, as each goes his or her separate way, living life, raising families, working in Africa, Haiti, or Wall Street, and, in one case, going to prison. The intensely detailed love triangle is reminiscent of an East Coast elite answer to the Midwestern trio of Freedom, but with mere keen observation in place of that other novel’s sweeping moral pronouncements. Hershon (The German Bride) explores the ways we can, and can’t, escape our backgrounds. Agent: Elizabeth Sheinkman, WME Entertainment. (May) 

Red Sparrow

By Jason Matthews

Matthews’s exceptional first novel will please fans of classic spy fiction. In Moscow, CIA agent Nathaniel Nash is running the most valuable asset in the CIA’s stable, a major general in the SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. After Nate nearly blows his agent’s cover, Nate’s chief reassigns him to the CIA station in Helsinki. Meanwhile, SVR deputy director Ivan “Vanya” Egorov decides to use his beautiful 25-year-old niece, Dominika Egorova, as bait in a honey trap designed to kill a Russian mobster who has publicly feuded with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Dominika likes this assignment well enough to ask her uncle to send her to spy school, where she excels. Diagnosed as a synesthete as a girl, Dominika has an unusual gift: she perceives sounds as colors and can tell if someone is lying by the color of his or her aura. After training, she sets out to find the Russian traitor Nate was running. The author’s 33-year career in the CIA allows him to showcase all the tradecraft and authenticity that readers in this genre demand. Recipes at the end of each chapter for a dish a character has eaten lend a homely culinary touch to the complex, high-stakes plot. 7-city author tour. Agent: Sloan Harris, International Creative Management. (May) 

Murder as a Fine Art

By David Morrell

A killer copying the brutal 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders terrorizes 1854 London in this brilliant crime thriller from Morrell (First Blood). The earlier slaughters, attributed to a John Williams, were the subject of a controversial essay by Thomas De Quincey entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” A man who considers himself an “artist of death” duplicates the first set of Williams’s killings by using a mallet and a knife to dispatch a shopkeeper, his wife, their two children (including an infant), and a servant. The similarities send the police after De Quincey, who, aided by his able daughter Emily, must vindicate himself and catch the killer. Morrell tosses in the political machinations of Lord Palmerston, then Home Secretary, who has been promoting revolution in Europe to assure Great Britain’s political dominance. Everything works—the horrifying depiction of the murders, the asides explaining the impact of train travel on English society, nail-biting action sequences—making this book an epitome of the intelligent page-turner. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (May) 

 Conspiracy of Faith

By Jussi Adler-Olsen

A cold 14-year-old murder-arson case preoccupies crotchety Copenhagen Deputy Det. Supt. Carl Morck in bestseller Alder-Olsen's third Department Q thriller (after 2012'S The Absent One), a shattering parable of honest individuals caught up in the corruption of our times. Morck must also contend with such problems as an office torn asunder by idiotic governmental asbestos mitigation; the replacement of his assistant Rose by even quirkier Yrsa; his enigmatic Arabic deputy, Assad, gone bonkers; his wayward wife, Vigga, threatening to return; and his paralyzed partner, Hardy, in residence in his living room. To complicate matters further, a mysterious SOS in a bottle puts Morck on the trail of one of the most cannily conceived serial child-killers imaginable. Morck faces these heart-wrenchers, small and large, by perceiving them as essentially analogues to everything that Denmark's welfare state has turned rotten--problems that are all immaterial, Morck insists, as long as he's doing his job. (May)

Pirate Alley

By Stephen Coonts

Naval aviator Jake Grafton joins forces with CIA operative Tommy Carmellini, the hero of his own series (The Discipline, etc.), in bestseller Coonts's 11th Jake Grafton thriller (after 2003's Liberty), a can't-put-it-down plunge into the fast-growing Somali priates sub-genre. A team of pirates, led by ruthless, brutal Mustafa al-Said, who works for warlord Sheikh Ragnar, seizes the 850-passenger cruise ship Sultan of the Seas after a hard case. American forces under the command of Adm. Toad Tarkington aboard Chosin Reservoir, an amphibious assault ship, are ready to intervene, but they operate under constraints. Politicians far away control the action and may in the end pay the pirates' ransom. After the liner is taken to the port of Eyl, Somalia, and the passengers are locked up in an old fortress, Grafton and Carmellini put boots on the ground and face down the bad guys with the help of SEALs, Force Recon, and other military units. This is a stomach-clenching nail-biter that will leave readers exhausted and satisfied that justice--very rough justice--has been served. (May)

Last Chance for Justice

By Kathi Macias

Readers will welcome this second printed book in the Bloomfield series (which also includes two e-books), a unique collaboration of multiple authors (with combined sales of over one million copies) centered on the small town of Bloomfield. Lynn Myers left the town 35 years ago to marry Daniel, but his recent death has left her alone. When a letter arrives informing her of her brother’s death and an inheritance, Lynn and daughter Rachel, freshly graduated from college, set out for Bloomfield. Little do they know they will soon be enmeshed in a long-unsolved mystery involving Last Chance Justice—a dead man—and $7.14, smalltown social affairs, and a love triangle involving Rachel and two very eligible young men. Will Lynn stay in Bloomfield with all its quirks and memories? Will Rachel? This sweet mystery/romance will charm readers looking for a clean story, as well as those eager to discover more about Bloomfield. Agent: Tamela Hancock Murray, the Steve Laube Agency. (May) 

 June 2013

If You Were Here

By Alafair Burke

Burke’s outstanding stand-alone suspense novel, her second after 2011’s Long Gone, stars appealing (if impulsive) McKenna Jordan, a New York City journalist whose stint covering the DA’s office ended in a maelstrom of media indignation when she falsely accused a cop of planting a gun. McKenna’s investigation into the story of an unidentified woman who singlehandedly pulled a teenager from the subway tracks takes an unexpected turn. Grainy video footage of the incident reveals that the heroic woman uncannily resembles McKenna’s old friend Susan Hauptmann, a gregarious West Point grad whose mysterious disappearance 10 years earlier has haunted McKenna. The stakes rise as McKenna moves from chasing the story du jour to chasing a long-buried truth—revisiting the character of the woman she thought she knew as well as the controversial case that discredited her. Burke succeeds in making Susan plausible as a woman who is charming and complex enough to warrant McKenna hurling herself into an inquiry that threatens her journalistic credibility, her relationship with her husband, and possibly her life. Burke’s accuracy in legal and judicial technicalities is impressive although most readers will find simpler pleasures in her sharp writing, well-constructed plot, and dimensional characters. Agent: Philip Spitzer, the Philip Spitzer Literary Agency. (June) 

The Peripatetic Coffin

By Ethan Rutherford

Rutherford’s sharp, inspired debut collection runs the gamut of emotion and genre, blending laughter and misery, reality and fantasy, in eight tales that ponder the methods in which humans achieve isolation. While many of these methods take the form of physical vessels—the Civil War-era submarine in the title story, the Russian ship headed toward the North Pole in “The Saint Anna,” a futuristic shipper-tank named Halcyon roaming the desert for dying prey in “Dirwhals!”—the author also fashions narratives focusing on psychological, corporeal seclusion. In “A Mugging,” a marriage slowly erodes after a violent robbery, and the nostalgically beautiful “Summer Boys” recounts a devoted childhood friendship that unfolds over the long, meandering days of summer vacation. Children find themselves in a different kind of summer story in “Camp Winnesaka,” a darkly comic, battle-ravaged tale of sleepover camp vs. sleepover camp that doubles as a sly commentary on the Iraq War. And though Rutherford (who appeared in Best American Short Stories 2009) dips into related thematic waters in nearly all of his narratives, the feeling of repetition never surfaces. These are robust, engaging stories. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (June) 



The Shanghai Factor

By Charles McCarry

Meticulous, intelligent prose is the real star of this excellent espionage thriller from former CIA operations officer McCarry (Christopher’s Ghosts), who focuses more on the psychological challenges faced by street-level agents and those running the operations than on physical action. One day on a Shanghai road, the unnamed 29-year-old narrator is riding his bicycle when a beautiful young Chinese woman, Mei, runs into him on her bike. Is it an accident? Our hero, “a rookie spook” working as a sleeper for the agency he calls Headquarters, immediately pegs Mei as an agent for the Chinese Ministry of State Security, but that doesn’t stop him from becoming her lover for the next two years. Eventually, his boss, the head of his agency’s counterintelligence division, calls him back to Washington, D.C., and gives him the assignment of building a network of Chinese spies drawn from the privileged class of party leaders’ children. Back in China, the narrator takes a job with a mysterious, imperious industrialist, Chen Qi, until he’s fired and assigned to Headquarters in Washington. While not much happens by the standard of your average spy novel and events get wrapped up quickly at the end, this book is a must-read for genre aficionados and McCarry’s many fans. (June) 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

By Neil Gaiman

“Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later... but they are never lost for good”—and the most grim of those memories, no matter how faint, can haunt one forever, as they do the anonymous narrator of Gaiman’s subtle and splendid modern myth. The protagonist, an artist, returns to his childhood home in the English countryside to recover his memory of events that nearly destroyed him and his family when he was seven. The suicide of a stranger opened the way for a deadly spirit who disguised herself as a housekeeper, won over the boy’s sister and mother, seduced his father, and threatened the boy if he told anyone the truth. He had allies—a warm and welcoming family of witches at the old farm up the road—but defeating this evil demanded a sacrifice he was not prepared for. Gaiman (Anansi Boys) has crafted a fresh story of magic, humanity, loyalty, and memories “waiting at the edges of things,” where lost innocence can still be restored as long as someone is willing to bear the cost. Agent: Merrilee Heifetz, Writers House. (June) 

Blood of Heaven

By Kent Wascom

Making brilliant use of a little-known chapter in America's history, Wascom's gripping debut captures the pioneer spirit, lawlessness, and religious fervor of the Southern frontier. In the Louisiana Territory in 1799, teenaged Angel Woolsack and his abusive, hellfire-preaching father encounter their equals: preacher Deacon Kemper and his sons. Deacon also deals in guns. Angel becomes blood brother to Samuel Kemper and the two elude their fathers and flee to Natchez, where they alternate between preaching and armed robbery. "I believed crime was spiritual, robbery an act of faith... In the process, both parties were brought close to God," Angel says. Eventually they reach the Spanish-owned region known as West Florida, where Angel continues to engage in mayhem and the murder of agents of the law. In time the brothers become involved in Aaron Burr's treacherous attempt to create an autonomous empire in Louisiana and Mexico. Angel is a hugely flawed hero, mixing biblical cadences with a Southern lilt, and pulsing with violence, religious hysteria, and sexual tension. Weaned on biblical prophecy and an angry deity, he's unable to resist taking vengeance upon those who oppose him, believing his behavior is God's will, and Wascom's visceral descriptions of slaughter are not for the fainthearted. Yet Angel is also devoted to shape his pistol-packing bride, Red Kate, and his handicapped son, and the forces that shape his character and destiny are clear. While Angel is fictional, the Kempers were real figures, legendary for their ambition. In its depiction of a primative, savage era and of man's depravity, as well as its sensitive protrayal of souls "drowned in the blood of Heaven," Wascom's novel is a masterly achievement. (June)

July 2013

In this compact, voyeuristic novel, Begley (About Schmidt) creates his latest larger-than-life character in the beguiling but sharp-tongued socialite Lucy De Bourgh. During the spring of 2003, elderly narrator Phillip, a successful literary novelist, is attending the New York City Ballet when he bumps into Lucy, an old friend and occasional lover from his carefree days in 1950s Paris. A striking beauty and wealthy Rhode Island blueblood, Lucy charmed with her personality and humor and disregarded Eisenhower-era mores with her easy sexuality. Lucy now seems bitter, however, and shocks Phillip by calling her late ex, Thomas Snow, a “monster.” Although coming from blue-collar roots, Thomas attended Harvard, made his fortune as a savvy investment banker, and after the divorce, died in a boating accident. A lonely widower, Phillip becomes fascinated with Lucy and Thomas’s divorce, perhaps seeing a future novel in their breakup. Possibly, though, he just finds titillation in Lucy’s sensational past. Begley’s effortless storytelling will have readers equally fascinated by Lucy and Phillips’s complex, tangled relationship. Agent: Georges Borchardt, George Borchardt Inc. (July) 

Nonfiction

 March 2013

The Still Point of the Turning World

By Emily Rapp

Rapp's next work after her memoir about her childhood disability and foot amputation (Poster Child) delineates a bracing, heartbreaking countdown in the life of her terminally ill son. At age nine months, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a rare, degenerative disease, involving the lack of an enzyme, that is always fatal, striking the parents as a complete surprise, despite the author's having been tested during standard prenatal screening. An affliction most prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews, Tay-Sachs actually has more than a hundred mutations. Ronan's "death sentence" was for Rapp and her husband, Rick, living in Santa Fe, a time of grief, reckoning, and learning how to live, and her elegant, restrained work flows with reflections and excerpts from writers and poets like Mary Shelley, Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath, as well as supporters who helped her during the difficult unraveling of her son's condition. Writing about Ronan allowed her to claim the sorrow and truly look at her son the way he was. Her narrative does not follow Ronan as far as his death, but gleans lessons from Buddhism and elsewhere in order that Rapp could "walk through this fire without being consumed by it." Unflinching and unsentimental, Rapp's work lends a useful, compassionate, healing message for suffering parents and caregivers. Agent, Dorian Karchmar, William Morris Endeavor (Mar.) 

 The Girls of Atomic City

By Denise Kiernan

During WWII, Oak Ridge, Tenn., was one unlikely epicenter of the Manhattan Project, the top secret program that produced the atomic bomb. Selected in 1942 for its remoteness, the area, "a big war site" hiring at top dollar, immediately boomed; from across the U.S., tens of thousands of workers streamed in—many of them women looking to broaden their horizons and fatten their purses. Fully integrated into the system, women worked every job, from courier to chemist. They found an "instant community" with "no history," but also "a secret city... [and] a project whose objective was largely kept from them." Living conditions were Spartan—urine samples and guards were intrusive constants—but the women lived their lives. Kiernan's (Signing Their Lives Away) interviewees describe falling in love and smuggling in liquor in tampon boxes. But like everyone else, those lives were disrupted by news of Hiroshima. "Now you know what we've been doing all this time," said one of the scientists. Many moved on; others stayed—Atomic City had become home. But for the women of Oak Ridge, "a strange mix of... pride and guilt and joy and shame" endured. This intimate and revealing glimpse into one of the most important scientific developments in history will appeal to a broad audience. 16-page b&w insert. Agent: Yfat Reiss Gendell, Foundry Literary + Media. (Mar.) 

April 2013

Country Girl: A Memoir

By Edna O'Brien

Demure reflections on her celebrated literary life well lived comprise this lovely memoir by Irish novelist and short story author O’Brien (Saints and Sinners). Organized thematically, O’Brien meanders from her deeply Catholic, decidedly respectable upbringing in Drewsboro, County Clare, where the budding young writer experienced the sensuous rural impressions that imbued her early work, through schooling with the Galway nuns and a four-year apprenticeship at a chemist’s shop in Dublin. But she yearned for a glittering literary world, “with all its sins and guile and blandishments.” Indeed, marrying the older, cosmopolitan novelist Ernest Gebler in her early 20s allowed O’Brien instant entrée into the literary milieu. She also gave birth to two sons. The publication of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960, spelled both the end of her marriage to a seething, resentful husband and her start as the novelist of the moment, reviled by the church for her depictions of liberated, sexual women while feted by literary lions of London and New York. Fetching, game, and talented, O’Brien attracted numerous famous studs, and she makes some bedroom confessions, revealing a night of “sparkle” with Robert Mitchum. The book also includes lively depictions of her Saturday-night parties in her house in Putney, England, during the Swinging Sixties. From Chelsea to New York to Donegal, O’Brien always returns to the enduring heart of her writing. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Literary Agency. (Apr.) 

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Roach (Stiff) once again goes boldly into the fields of strange science. In the case of her newest, some may hesitate to follow—it’s about the human digestive system, and it’s as gross as one might expect. But it’s also enthralling. From mouth to gut to butt, Roach is unflinching as she charts every crevice and quirk of the alimentary canal—a voyage she cheerily likens to “a cruise along the Rhine.” En route, she comments on everything from the microbial wisdom of ancient China, to the tactics employed by prisoners when smuggling contraband in their alimentary “vaults,” the surprising success rate of fecal transplants, how conducting a colonoscopy is a little like “playing an accordion,” and a perhaps too-good-to-be-true tale in the New York Times in 1896 of a real-life Jonah surviving a 36-hour stint in the belly of a sperm whale. Roach’s approach is grounded in science, but the virtuosic author rarely resists a pun, and it’s clear she revels in giving readers a thrill—even if it is a queasy one. Adventurous kids and doctors alike will appreciate this fascinating and sometimes ghastly tour of the gastrointestinal system. 18 illus. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) 

In the Body of the World

By Eve Ensler

In this extraordinarily riveting, graphic story of survival, Ensler, an accomplished playwright (The Vagina Monologues) and activist in international groups such as V-Day, which works to end violence against women, depicts her shattering battle with uterine cancer. Having felt estranged from her body for a lifetime, and been molested by her father and enthralled by alcohol and promiscuity early on, Ensler as a playwright was seized with a political awareness of the fire violence committed against women across the globe. At the age of 57, she was blindsided when she discovered that her own health emergency mimicked the ones that women were enduring in the developing countries she had visited: "the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed... the cancer of buried trauma." Her narrative, she writes, is like a CAT scan, "a roving examination--capturing images," recording in minute, raw detail the ordeals she underwent over seven months. These included her crazed, "hysterical" response to the diagnosis and her treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., as well as extensive surgery, chemo, radiation, and caring by a "posse" of comapnions in misery, like her estranged sister, Lu, and far-flung friends such as Mama C, the head of the City of Joy women's center in the Congo. He anatomy of the invasion of women's bodies is often difficult to read; the lesson she learns is that in order to heal, she had to submit her body to a renewed source of love and joy. (April)

Clean

By David Sheff

(Reviewed by Hunter R. Slaton). Sheff’s bestselling Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction flipped the script on the traditional first-person addiction memoir, painting an agonizing portrait of what one family went through when its “beautiful boy,” Nic Sheff, descended into years of methamphetamine addiction, deceit, and relapse. By the final page, he had been clean for a full year. But while the story may have ended for Sheff’s family, the tragedy continues for the 20 million Americans who are currently addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. Thus, Sheff the elder is back; in his latest, he takes a macro look at the micro problem detailed in Beautiful Boy, to examine the state of addiction and addiction treatment—sadly lacking, he finds—in the U.S. today.As Sheff sees it, the chief impediments to preventing and treating addiction are the same ones that existed when Alcoholics Anonymous was founded 78 years ago: the stigma associated with addiction, and the belief that drug abuse is a choice, rather than a disease. Sheff once held this belief, but his thinking evolved over years of grappling with his son’s addiction. Clean is at its best when the author grounds his conclusions in real-life trials and tribulations, whether his or others’.Unfortunately, the book is at times too thinly peopled, descending into rote lists of best practices and expert opinions, as exemplified by the chapter “Beginning Treatment”: “All support staff working with patients should be well trained and closely supervised”; “Programs should evaluate whether it would be beneficial for family members to be involved in treatment”; and so on. These passages are a perfect illustration of why a writer should always “show” rather than “tell.”But when Sheff lets recovering addicts and their families make his case for him, the story is gripping and vibrant—Luke Gsell tells about finding himself in rehab on the night before his 15th birthday, gobbling down stolen Dramamine: “ ‘Everything snapped,’ Luke said. ‘I thought, This is my one shot and I’m getting high. I was tripping on seasickness pills in rehab... I recognized that I was an addict. I said, ‘I’m done with this.’ ” The book is not this vivid or cathartic throughout, but Sheff makes his case methodically and convincingly, finishing with a stark look at the failure of the War on Drugs—and a comparison to the far more effective wars on cancer and AIDS, fought with the weaponry of “education and prevention, changing public policy, and improving treatment,” rather than “interdiction, arrest, prosecution, and eradication.” “The war must be ended,” Sheff concludes—and a new, more benevolent approach, outlined in a set of cleverly rewritten “12 Steps,” begun. Hunter R. Slaton is an editor at the TheFix.com, an online magazine about addiction and recovery. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. 

Shadow Warrior: The Life of William Egan Colby

By Randall B. Woods

A lifelong CIA counterinsurgency specialist, William Egan Colby (1920–1996) was a central figure in America’s post-WWII clandestine operations. University of Arkansas history professor Woods (LBJ: Architect of American Ambition) delivers an engrossing account of Colby’s contentious life and career, from early intelligence recruit during the Second World War to his suspicious demise in the Chesapeake Bay. As CIA station chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War (where “he had been the only high-ranking official to move about at night without an armed escort”), Colby was skeptical of the efficacy of conventional strategies in fighting communism, and eventually oversaw the controversial and brutal Phoenix Program, which sought to systematically cripple the Viet Cong. Later, he served as director of the CIA under presidents Nixon and Ford at a time when it was roundly criticized as “an Agency run amok,” though he did his best to usher in “a new sense of openness.” Those efforts enraged many colleagues, and led some (including Colby’s son Carl) to suggest his death was politically motivated. Scathingly critical of both the CIA and the government it served, Wood’s thoroughly entertaining portrait reveals plenty of warts, as well as a thoughtful character, surprisingly liberal and sophisticated about the limitations of CIA derring-do. 35 b&w images. (Apr.) 

The Third Coast

By Thomas Dyja

Novelist and Chicago native Dyja (Play for a Kingdom) delivers a magisterial narrative of mid-20th century Chicago, once America’s “primary meeting place, market, workshop and lab.” Dyja covers the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, when Chicago produced much of what became postwar America’s way of life: Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel skyscrapers; TV’s soap operas; Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s franchise; Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire; and the Chess Brothers’ recording studio that unleashed Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, urban blues, and rock ’n’ roll. Though the book focuses on Chicago’s pivotal role in producing America’s mass-market culture, Dyja highlights how Chicago was also wrestling with the counterculture—the improvisational theater of Second City, the urban poor in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and Nelson Algren’s novels, Moholy’s experimental Institute of Design, and new styles in television and music aimed at people, not markets. As Dyja notes, racial strife pervaded all aspects of life in the city, which was home to the National Baptist Convention; the Harlem Globetrotters; major black press outlets (Ebony and Jet, among others); and Emmett Till, whose murder sparked the Civil Rights movement. Dyja explores Chicago’s politics, and how the city’s leadership attempted to address the “racial wound,” caused, in part, by placing all public housing in black neighborhoods. What emerges is a luminous, empathetic, and engrossing portrait of a city. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM. (Apr.)

Pere Marie-Benoit and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands During the Holocaust

By Susan Zuccotti

Who better to rescue from obscurity an Oskar Schindler–like hero than historian Zuccotti (The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews)? She has written extensively on the experience of French and Italian Jews in the Holocaust, but it’s more than her impressive credentials and knowledge base that makes this biography an intellectual page-turner accessible to a general audience. This account of the life of Capuchin priest Père Marie-Benoît and his successful efforts to save thousands of Jews offers the perfect amount of detail and context. Zuccotti’s approach begins before Marie-Benoît’s birth in 1895, with a review of the geography and history of the region in France where he was born. She then moves on to profile the courageous priest in the trenches of the First World War, where he served as a stretcher-bearer, and afterward during his high-level religious studies in Rome after the war. When Italy declared war on his homeland in 1940, Marie-Benoît returned to a divided France, where he witnessed the persecution and deportation of Jews. Zuccotti naturally asks why her protagonist, under pressure to go along with the anti-Judaism of the Catholic Church, bucked the trend, but in the absence of an explanation from him, does not dwell on speculation. Relying on archival sources and her own interviews with Marie-Benoît and those he helped to save, Zuccotti’s portrait of the “Father of the Jews” is as historically important as it is entertaining. Photos. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Apr.) 

Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age

By Allen Barra

In these elegant and touching fan notes, acclaimed sportswriter Barra carries us back to baseball's golden days, when two giants--Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays--dominated the game through their skill and prodigious talent. Giving a fast-paced, season-by-season account of the lives of these players, whose careers developed along parallel lines and sometimes intersected, Barra recreates the excitement, the adoration, and the adulation that Mantle and Mays inspired in their fans--as well as the occasional disappointments. Barra notes the many similarities in the players' lives: both hailed from the South and both are talented all-around athletes who played football, baseball, and basketball; both had fathers who encouraged them, though Mays's let his son follow his talents to center field naturally, while Mantle's groomed his son for center field from the start. Alike as they were, the differences were stark: Mays came from a broken home and Mantle from a large, close-knit family. Barra pulls no punches as he candidlyt portrays Mantle's struggles with alcohol and Mays's anxiety attacks off the field. Mantle will go down in the record books for his home run of 563 feet on April 17, 1953--famously the first home run ever officially measured (a "tape measure" home run) for distance; Mays would gain his celebrity for "the catch," a stunning grab 460 feet from home plate in the 1954 World Series. Drawing on his conversations with Mantle and Mays, Barra offers illuminating insights into their views of success and failure as well as into the ways that we often create larger-than-life heroes out of individuals who sometimes cannot carry the burdens of our dreams and hopes. (April)

For the Survival of Liberty: Great Presidential Decisions

By Elton B. Kilbanoff

By focusing on the lives and accomplishments of six United States presidents, historian Klibanoff lays out a richly detailed blueprint for American liberty. Beginning with George Washington—"No single person is more responsible for the success of the brave experiment in liberty," the author notes—and the development of the country's economic framework, Klibanoff culls from diverse sources (including the presidents' own letters and public papers) to create extensive profiles of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. Jefferson oversaw significant U.S. expansion with the Louisiana Purchase, Monroe protected liberties in foreign countries via the Monroe Doctrine, Lincoln pursued freedom and equal opportunity for all Americans through his Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, Wilson presented the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and blazed new trails toward international peace, and Roosevelt's New Deal provided relief to banks, farmers, and the unemployed following the Great Depression. Not all of these pursuits of liberty were popular at the time, but as Klibanoff points out in "legacy" sections and a short concluding chapter, repercussions can still be felt today. Klibanoff goes beyond textbooks, synthesizing volumes of material into a cohesive and engaging 300 pages, while not overlooking interesting details, such as Lincoln's hand becoming "extremely swollen from greeting his visitors" on New Year's Day. 

June 2013

The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

By Mary Pipher

Psychologist Pipher (Reviving Ophelia) brings her wisdom about how individuals interact with culture to this compassionate, beautiful, and personal approach to acknowledging the global enviromental crisis while maintaining mental balance and hope. As Pipher lucidly explains, the overwhelming amount of information about the desperate state of our planet leads to stress, avoiding discussion, willful ignorance, and outright denial, while the activist's call of "Wake up!" is an ineffective remedy. Instead, Pipher distinguishes between "distractionable intelligence," which makes us feel helpless, and "actionable intelligence," which combines information with suggestions for addressing problems, thus creating hope, motivation, and change. She affirms that with guidance and support, we can reach states of acceptance, action, and, eventually, transcendent growth. Using her experience as an organizer against TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline across the Nebraska Sandhills as an example, Pipher shows the power that groups working together have to provide meaning, healing, and replenishing social support, while allowing individuals to feel like they have a serious role. Serious, yet accessible, realistic without being alarmist, this could be the most effectively inspirational book available about an individual's relationship to the global environmental crisis. (June).

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