Editor’s Choice
Bleeding Kansas, by Sara Paretsky, $25.95. Best-seller Paretsky, who has tackled weighty issues in her V.I. Warshawski detective series (e.g., the Holocaust in “Total Recall”), weaves a gripping, contemporary novel around three farm families — the Grelliers, Fremantles and Schapens — that can trace their Kaw Valley, Kan., roots back to the 1850s, a time of violent clashes between anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces.
FICTION
Matala, by Craig Holden, $22. Darcy, a rich, world-weary teenager on a European tour, meets Will, a boy she thinks she recognizes from her high school. Will, world-weary in a different way — the down-on-your-luck kind — has been traveling for several years with Justine and has been schooled in the art of the scam. They con Darcy. The real story centers on the emotional void in each of the three characters and how their chance meeting sets them on the road to healing. Missing Witness, by Gordon Campbell, $24.95. In his promising debut, trial lawyer Campbell delivers an intriguing, if often overly technical, story of long-buried family secrets and the blurred line between lies and the truth.
NONFICTION
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis, $29.95, This superb portrayal by New York University history professor Lewis of the fraught half-millennium during which Islam and Christianity uneasily coexisted on the continent just beginning to be known as Europe displays the formidable scholarship and magisterial ability to synthesize vast quantities of material that won him Pulitzer Prizes for both volumes of “W.E.B. Du Bois.”The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy, by Bill Hayes, $24.95. Science writer Hayes combines a you-are-there account with interesting biographical details about the men who put the human body on the map. The map is “Gray’s Anatomy,” the reference work … used by generations of medical students since its first edition was published in 1858.You Can Lead a Politician to Water But You Can’t Make Him Think: Ten Commandments for Texas Politics, by Kinky Friedman, $22. Friedman’s always irreverent, sometimes profane and occasionally sophomoric commentary won’t appeal to everybody, but even those who refuse to laugh out loud can find verities worth repeating.
PAPERBACKS
On The Wealth of Nations, by P.J. O’Rourke, $13. Think of it as a hardcover blog, in which O’Rourke cites Adam Smith’s essential points and riffs while preaching Smithian doctrine this book is well worth reading. You’ll pick up a few good lines, you’ll see a primo stylist at work. And you’ll see why Adam Smith is so often quoted but so rarely read.In This Rain, by S.J. Rozan, $12. Edgar-winner Rozan (Absent Friends) draws on her experience as a professional architect in this complex thriller that focuses on New York City’s construction and development business.Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, by Michael B. Oren, $17.95. A series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures.
COMING UP
City of the Sun, by David Levien, $24.95. Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban Indianapolis neighborhood. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. His parents hire detective Frank Behr to find out what happened. (March) The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi, by Aram Roston, $26.95. Even though he was a convicted felon and fugitive from justice in Jordan, Chalabi persuaded American leaders to go to war in Iraq. This is his story. (March)
Publishers Weekly
